One of the quiet perks of touring a lot is racking up crazy amounts of award points with airlines and hotels. The thing is though, there’s usually one easy moment to add your rewards number – checking in for your flight or checking in at the hotel.

After that point, to add them retroactively, can be a real pain.

And when you’re not even sure what city, state, or possibly even country you are in, after 24-36 hours straight of work or travel – trying to keep track of a ton of different reward point systems can be both overwhelming and feel like it’s not worth the hassle.

The thing is though, those points all add up and can be a nice extra bonus when you come off the road or during vacations where you don’t have to pay much (or at all) for flights and hotels booked on your dime.

The trick, like so many things, is to streamline your process.

The easiest, high tech way, is to sign up with AwardWallet – a free website that not only keeps track of all your different membership numbers so you can easily enter them in that kiosk at the airport or tell a hotel clerk at check in – it also tracks what you’ve racked up.

They have an easy to use app too.

Now, AwardWallet has a free version that I’ve been using for about 10 years – I found this site during my cruise ship days and kept adding frequent flyer numbers for the different airlines I was flying back then.

I’ve also used it to help track miles when churning credit cards – on a trip to Vegas a few years ago when I was short points, I was able to pull up my AwardWallet screen and realized I had some extra points sitting in a different reward category. I looked up the transfer info for those extra points and it turned out that I could transfer them to the airline I was hoping to book on – putting me a lot closer to my goal. My $600 ticket became like a $100 ticket when I bought some extra “points” so I could use those reward miles.

All that being said, the free version has been really helpful for me for years. The paid version is $30/year and unless you’re trying to hardcore optimize a lot of travel point hacking, you probably don’t need it.

The easiest low tech way that I keep track of my miles (because who knows when you’ll be somewhere with no phone service), is this fancy little thing:

Funny story, AwardWallet has a legit fancy card it will make of all your rewards numbers and send to you for $10. I am not sure who would spend $10 on this, but it does exist. And it is quite fancy.

I prefer my super ghetto free one made of printer paper and scotch tape – also easier and cheaper to reprint when I join a new rewards club. You could even go a step lower tech and not bother with the scotch tape.

Or for my stage managers and any other position that may have a laminator available, you could go crazy high tech and laminate the sucker. Or have a laminating party and have your whole team print out their paper versions with their numbers and fill a single sheet of laminate with everyone’s cards. Such an efficient use of resources.

Since we’ve managed to set our printer on fire despite using a power convertor in the last few countries, I have opted to skip the laminator and just go with scotch tape.

You can also go to the company websites and sign up for a rewards account in advance with a lot of hotels and airlines. Since your home airport is probably a hub for a major airline, I’d recommend finding out which one and starting there – it’s a line you’ll probably fly a lot. Choice Hotels, IHG, Marriott and Wyndham Rewards cover a lot of different hotel lines, which makes them good starting places for hotel reward accounts.

How do you track your travel rewards?