American Airlines’ BIG Mistake with Award Wallet
I know the following is a bit late, and I apologize as I have been a little busy, but I think it is worth mentioning:
Award Wallet is an incredible frequent flyer tool. Not only can it track your mileage and point balances, but it also serves as an incredible portal for logging into all of your reward accounts, by safely storing account passwords.
AwardWallet Letter
Thus, it was to my dismay that I found out about the bone-headed move American Airlines has made with regards to AwardWallet.
According to the following letter, effective February 25 Award Wallet will no longer provide any sort of access to American AAdvantage accounts:
Dear Field Of Burch,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.If you have any questions about this matter please do not reply to this email, instead lets have a discussion in the forum:http://awardwallet.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1940Back in December, American had some security concerns about AwardWallet storing membership numbers, and requested them to stop doing so. AwardWallet responded–and cleverly so, by setting up a browser extension to store data from AAdvantage accounts, on them the memory of one’s own computer. Evidently that was not enough for American Airlines.
In the first place, AwardWallet is an opt-in program—no one is making you use it. More importantly, you as the user have the legal right to store your PERSONAL account information, especially if it is stored LOCALLY on your computer. And while you may be under American’s terms and conditions in general when setting up a frequent flyer, it is ultimately YOUR DECISION how you store that data.
HAVE I USED ALL CAPS ENOUGH??
Anyway, don’t mean to rant, but I seriously hope American changes their policy on AwardWallet!
Are you listening American?!
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Point Me to the Miles 