The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal section today has a question from a reader who asks whether there is one website that tracks miles and rewards from various affinity programs. The Journal’s Jane Kim responds as follows:
“Web sites such as MaxMiles.com and MileageManager.com will gather frequent-flier balances and account information from consumers’ airline, hotel and credit-card reward programs. Although some services charge an annual fee, they offer such perks as email alerts on when miles will expire and award listings. Many banks and brokerage firms, such as Fidelity Investments and Bank of America, offer services that consolidate financial accounts, including balances in reward programs, usually free of charge to their customers. Yodlee, which provides account-consolidation software to many financial-services firms, also lets consumers keep track of their finances and reward programs for free on Yodlee.com”.
Oddly, Kim fails to list www.points.com, a website that not only tracks the various airline miles programs but also allows account holders to swap them between programs and even earn free gift certificates for those pesky few thousand miles one tends to gather on one-off flights on airlines that are used occasionally. I have used points.com for over a year and have picked more than a few hundred dollars from book stores and other outlets – miles that would perhaps have languished unused for years.