I’m a huge fan of Mint.com so when I heard AwardWallet.com mentioned in the same sentence, I decided to take a look. The concept is straight forward. Enter your login credentials and AwardWallet.com will track your balances and notify you of events such as expiration of points/miles.
The Good:
- The interface is clean
- The website had no issues gathering my balance information; I tested 2 hotels, 2 airlines, 2 car rentals, and my corporate card
- I really like having all my membership numbers in a single location
The Not-So-Good:
- I got a email telling me about my travel itinerary as soon as I entered my airline information; I did not ask to track my travel plans.
- Instead of displaying my Hertz balance, it had a link asking me to upgrade to AwardWallet Plus; I haven’t had a chance to see the value in the service and I’m already being asked for money?
- A connection section; No I’m not interested in sharing my travel plans with all my connections
Suggestion to AwardWallet.com: You need to focus on being awesome in a single space. Stop trying to compete with TripIt. Build a great service, then ask for money. Asking me to upgrade before I can truely understand the value is wasting both our times. Not everything needs to have a social networking component to it (Mint.com did not and look how well they did). Some of us think Facebook is a waste of time (and frequent flyers don’t have alot of time). Understand your target customer and get some of them on your board. Your website is called "Award Wallet", not "Travel Itineraries" or "Travel Connections" - either change your name or stop trying to be all things. FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS
I plan to report back after I’ve given it a few cycles. Let’s see what happens.
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Thanks for the article! I am a co-owner of AwardWallet and the person in charge of development progress. So I agree with most of your pros and cons, but wanted to clarify some thing (as well as do a little bit of defending :). So first of all, just to clarify, here is what you get for free:
Here is what you get when you upgrade: - See expiration dates for all programs added to profile on that summary page - See detailed account info, such as number of segments traveled, etc. - See charts showing activity over time.
more details here: http://www.awardwallet.com/faqs.php#21
As far as “The Not-So-Good” ones go here is what i think.
On the first one I agree, grabbing itineraries should be optional. I already have a case in the dev queue to make that an option.
So this was a fourth program that you’ve added and we did grab an expiration date for it. So in the free version we only show the first 3 expirations. I think it is not a bad idea to provide free AwardWallet Plus functionality for the first week or month of membership. I also suspect that there would be not-so-happy users that would see that they got “downgraded” after a month of using the service. So I really have to think about it.
Connections have three types - for sharing reward balances, for sharing travel plans, and both. This functionality was originally developed strictly for sharing reward numbers and / or balances. Here is a business case: I am a travel agent and I manage travel for 20 employees of my company. They need to communicate to me all of their reward numbers in a secure way so that as they get enrolled into new programs they can share those reward numbers with me. This way, I, as a travel agent, can book the flights and hotels and use the reward numbers right at the time of the reservation. For a company this is a very useful feature and this is why we added it.
Also why not compete with TripIT? Perhaps we can do it better? I know we are not there yet but we are moving forward and our way of grabbing itineraries is easier than what TripIT offers. With AwardWallet you don’t have to do anything at all, we will grab your plans and organize everything automatically, no need to email anything. I agree with you that our name is AwardWallet and it doesn’t reflect anything about travel plans, but we’ve invested a lot into the name and changing it is not an option, and at the same time we do want to compete with the big guys like TripIT. If anything it will make them do a better job at improving their service to stay competitive, so for the end user it is all good, regardless if we succeed or not.
Again thanks for the review and I will be checking back to see if we can impress you as time goes! We really do try hard.
Cheers, -Alexi
Thanks for the comments Alexi. It still appears like you’re trying to figure out who your target customer is before you’ve had a chance to collect some data. If you try and be all things to everyone, you will get a little bit of each segment and the experience won’t be AWESOME. It will be mediocre.
Who’s your target segment?
What do you want to help your customer do?
You’re building a solution before you know who you’re building it for. You can come up with a business case for every new feature if you want to, but there is a price for every feature you add. I like what you’ve done so far, but you may want to step in the shoes of your target customer (and interview a few of them). If you find yourself trying on a bunch of shoes, it may be time to think about your favorite pair and wear it for a while before you buy more. Good luck!