Category Archives: Award Wallet

No More Comments (For Now) from American Airlines & Award Wallet

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet

After posting Award Wallet Responds To My Posts About The American Airlines Situation to the blog, I sent e-mails to

  1. The PR Rep for AA (that had contacted me initially) to see what his thoughts were on Award Wallet’s comments in the post.
  2. The Award Wallet President letting him know about my post (that included the comments he had e-mailed me regarding AA) and asked him a bunch of questions…

This is my e-mail sent to PR for American:

Hi Alan,
Just wanted to let you know that the President of Award Wallet sent me an e-mail and the Co-Founder & CTO responded to my post that included AA’s response to why the extension could be not used.
I made another post to my blog with both of their comments…
You can check the post out here.
If you get to check out the post, I’d love to know what your thoughts are on what AW had to say.
Thanks,
Michael W.

 The response was:

Hi Michael,
Thanks for sending this. I appreciate you sharing the thoughts from AW. However, what I provided earlier is all we can say at this time.
Best,
Alan
This is my e-mail sent back to the President of AW:

Hey Jeff,
Thanks for writing to me. I made a post to my blog with the e-mail you sent me and a comment left on one of my posts by Alexi V.
I had a couple of questions for you.
1- Why do you think AA is so against being tracked on Award Wallet?
2- Has AA tried to charge Award Wallet a fee to be allowed the rights to be tracked?
3- Has AA tried to help or asked AW to do something to comply with their “rigorous security requirements”?
4- Is Award Wallet being considered as one of the mileage tracking sites that will qualify to track AA? I am assuming no…
Sincerely,
Michael W.
The response was:
          Hi Michael,
Unfortunately, I can’t address your (perfectly reasonable) other questions at this point but I hope to be able to do so within a couple of weeks.
Jeff Bianco
President Award Wallet
I was hoping to get some more answers but it is definitely understandable that both sides can not comment any further for now.

Award Wallet Responds To My Posts About The American Airlines Situation

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet

Last Friday I wrote about AA forcing Award Wallet to discontinue the browser extension. This has made a lot of people annoyed and upset at American Airlines. Many feel that AA is not playing fairly with a small company and has other issues to worry about while in bankruptcy.

A couple of hours after publishing the above post, I received an e-mail from AA regarding Award Wallet which you can read here. American Airlines is saying that security is the issue with our miles being tracked on AW.

The weekend passed and there wasn’t much else to report regarding AA and Award Wallet until today.

I was checking e-mail from my phone and had a message from the President of AwardWallet, Jeff Bianco regarding the response I received from AA. A few hours later, I also had a comment on my AA Response post from Alexi Vereschaga, Co-Founder & CTO of AwardWallet.

Here is what they had to say: 
E-Mail from Jeff Bianco, President of AwardWallet:

American Airlines response to you is missing the point.

AwardWallet’s browser extension allows you the user,to store your username and password on your own computer.  It was never transmitted to AwardWallet.  Your computer accesses the AA.com site and stores the resulting balance information locally on your computer.  It is then displayed within the context of AwardWallet but the information was not transmitted to our site or our servers. 

Their response to you makes no sense in regard to AwardWallet.  It may make sense in regard to other mileage tracking sitesbut not in regard to what we were doing.

Comment to my AA response post from Alexi Vereschaga,Co-Founder & CTO of AW  

Hi, this is Alexi from AwardWallet. I just wanted to point out one important thing – AwardWallet (a third party website) is not accessing aa.com and is not storing any data related to AA in our database. With the browser extension it is the user who is accessing their site via their own browser and all the data is stored in that browser so it never reaches our server at any point.

Based on what AwardWallet is saying, it does seem like American’s talk of security being an issue makes little sense. I do want to believe the reasoning AA has given me but if all of the data is being stored locally on our own computers how can this be?
If AwardWallet does not have any of our information transmitted to their servers, then how is security really an issue?

I am going to send the Award Wallet responses to the PR rep for American Airlines. Hopefully he will get back to me.
I also plan to e-mail the president of Award Wallet to see why he thinks American is so against being tracked on their site.

I Received A Response from AA Regarding Award Wallet

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet

I wrote a post about AA Forces Award Wallet to Discontinue Extension earlier today.

A couple of hours ago I received an e-mail from Alan Phillips of Weber Shandwick, the PR firm for American Airlines.
Mr. Phillips wrote to me responding to my post regarding AA and the Award Wallet extension.

I did not expect to get a response from AA regarding Award Wallet when I made my post but am really glad that I did. I’d say that pretty much everyone is taking sides with Award Wallet so why not hear AA’s thoughts on this matter. It’s always nice to hear both sides to a story!

Here is the e-mail:
Hello Michael,


I saw this post “http://michaelwtravels.blogspot.com/2012/02/aa-forces-award-wallet-to-discontinue.html” from you regarding American Airlines.

I want to provide you with American’s perspective on this topic. This is attributable to American Airlines or an American Airlines spokesperson.
·         Upholding its long-held stance on how third-party websites access proprietary AAdvantage member details is just one of the ways American protects the benefits afforded through the AAdvantage program.
·         Because travelers’ AAdvantage account numbers and passwords can be used to claim AAdvantage mileage awards out of their accounts and access personal details, American will always protect this information.
·         Security is chief among our points of consideration when we make decisions regarding the sharing of our customers’ data with third-party websites
·         We simply cannot permit websites that have not satisfied our security requirements the access needed to track AAdvantage balances or any other function that is otherwise secured behind AA.com login credentials.
·         Consistent with these principles, it is worth noting that Points.com, an AAdvantage participant, allows many of the same types of services as other mileage tracker websites – but has fully satisfied our rigorous security requirements.
·         We are also in the process of qualifying a number of other mileage tracker websites.
Best,
Alan

Mr. Phillips is making a case for AA using protection and security as the reasons why Award Wallet can not be allowed to track our AAdvantage accounts.
If this is a real concern and issue then I am fine with AA’s stance regarding this. My AA miles are definitely valuable and pretty much as good as money to me. I just wonder why other airlines are not concerned about the security of our accounts. Why is United,Delta & US Airways (among others) still being tracked on Award Wallet? Are their sites more secure than AA?

I sent a couple of questions back to Mr. Phillips and am waiting for a response.
I’d like to know what other mileage tracking sites are in the process of being qualified by AA?
I would also like to know if making money from tracking sites is an issue? If Award Wallet was able to pay a fee, would they be allowed to track our accounts?

AA Forces Award Wallet to Discontinue Extension

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet

American Airlines has once again put a stop to allowing people to track their mileage balances on Award Wallet.


When AA sued Award Wallet (I believe they threatened to sue) last year they came up with a browser extension as a solution. AA felt that Award Wallet was collecting customer’s mileage data. The extension seemed to solve this issue by storing data locally on your computer.

The extension will be discontinued on 2/25/12.

Here is the post about this from Award Wallet:
“We regret to inform you that we will be discontinuing support for the AwardWallet browser extension on February 25, 2012. This means that you will no longer be able to track your American Airlines related information (balance, status, etc.) on AwardWallet.com.

 We have been forced to take this action by American Airlines’ stance toward AwardWallet. We created the browser extension in order to address American Airlines’ concern that AwardWallet was collecting customers’ mileage data. We believe the extension addressed this concern because it simply collected your mileage data and stored it locally on your computer. American Airlines, however, objects to the extension. It’s position appears to be that AwardWallet is prohibited from providing any software tool that facilitates the ability to track the customer’s American Airlines’ mileage information. We think this is unfortunate.

Please make a note of your AAdvantage number and password as you will not be able to see it on AwardWallet.com after we make this change. Thank you for your continued support of AwardWallet.com!”

Award Wallet posted the info regarding the AA Extension here 


AwardWallet- Not Really Losing American Airlines Tracking

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet, Mileage, Miles

Sites like AwardWallet are extremely useful for keeping track of all of your airline & hotel mileage balances all in one place.
I definitely recommend that you sign up if you don’t have an account.
If you would like an invite to join or a free upgrade coupon (for first time users, 10 available), please e-mail me at michaelwtravels@gmail.com)

When American Airlines account tracking was removed from MileWise a couple of months back, I figured that AwardWallet would soon follow due to pressure (legal action?) from AA.

I am happy too say that this is not exactly the case for
AwardWallet.
I received an e-mail earlier today stating that they will no longer be able to store our American Airlines information/ passwords. They will release a browser extension which will allow each AW user’s browser to store the info. This will let our AA information to continue being shown with our other mileage accounts!

Here is the e-mail:

Dear Michael,
American Airlines has contacted us and stated that we may not access its website on your behalf and that we may not store any of your American Airlines account data on our servers. As a result, in the coming weeks we will release a browser extension which will enable you to check your balance and still display that balance along with the rest of your loyalty account balances; however, the data, such as your username, password, balance and any other attributes will only be stored in your browser so we will never have access to it. Also, this browser extension will be accessing American Airlines website from your computer and not from our servers. Since we do not have this extension ready yet, please save all of your American Airlines accounts and password in a secure place so that you can enter that data when we release the extension. Here are the accounts that you have stored with AwardWallet today:
Please open this page to print these account numbers along with your passwords before December 4, 2011. In the coming weeks we will release the AwardWallet browser extension to those users who wish to participate in our beta. If you want to be included in the beta, please follow this link: http://awardwallet.com/participateInBeta/

We will send you an email when we are ready for you to participate in the beta. Depending on how many volunteers we have we may not be able to invite everyone to limit the amount of support requests.
Please note that your American Airlines data will be removed from our servers on December 4, 2011. This will not have any impact on your actual American Airlines account or mileage balance.
If you have any questions regarding this email, please read this FAQ first : http://awardwallet.com/faqs.php#34
Also in order to avoid too many redundant emails regarding this matter please post your questions on our forum: http://awardwallet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1567
We apologize for this inconvenience, and we always strive to make AwardWallet the best reward tracking service.
Thank you,
AwardWallet team.
AwardWallet.com

If you have AwardWallet or plan to sign up, make sure to register for the beta if you want AA to still be tracked.

What is your favorite site for tracking all of your account balances???