Help! How Do You Keep Track Of Travel Credits?

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The banks offer benefits to customers so that they’ll sign up, use and hopefully keep travel credit cards. One perk that high annual fee cards often use is a travel credit. The statement credit cancels out charges made in qualifying categories. What charges are eligible range from the Sapphire Reserve’s broad travel categories to AMEX’s restrictive airline fee credit.

If you have several cards that provide credits for travel purchases, it can become challenging to remember which credits you’ve already used. Keeping track is made even more difficult because some credits reset on the card anniversary date while others reset at the end of the calendar year.

Here are some of the available credits from travel credit cards:

• American Express Platinum – $200 Airline Incidental Fee Credit
• Chase Sapphire Reserve – $300 Travel Credit
• Citi Prestige – $250 Travel Credit
• Capital One Venture X – $300 Credit for bookings using Capital One Travel.
• Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards Priority – $75 Southwest Credit
• Hilton Aspire AMEX – $250 Airline Incidental Fee Credit
• Ritz Carlton Card – $300 Annual Travel Credit

That’s not even including other credits, like those for CLEAR, streaming services, TSA Precheck and food delivery services.

When I only had a few of these credits, it was easy to remember which ones I used and those I had left. However, now that seemingly every card has some rebate, it’s become harder to keep them straight. Awardwallet, the travel account tracking website, has added remaining travel credits and expiration dates to some, but not all, accounts.

The more restrictive the credit, the more likely I will forget about it. For example, I don’t use Capital One Travel often so I need to remember to book through the website and use up the $300 Venture X credit.

Besides using a spreadsheet, does anyone else have a better way to keep track of these benefits?

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