Travel tip: store frequent flyer numbers in your smartphone's address book

Tired of juggling all those loyalty reward cards for airlines, hotels and car hire companies?

Business travellers and frequent flyers typically have a dozen or more such cards, but you may not want to carry them all around.

I certainly don't – in fact, I purposefully slim down my wallet before each trip, because I don't see the sense in carry anything more than I'm likely to need.

A good place to store the details of all your airline, hotel and hire car loyalty programs is on your smartphone.

And there's plenty of software which lets you do this: from password-protected 'virtual wallets' designed for more sensitive data such as credit card and bank accounts details, to dedicated apps like AwardWallet designed to monitor and track your points.

But if all you want to do is keep your membership number in each loyalty program at hand, the simplest solution is to enter them into your smartphone's address book.

Fire up your desktop address book software and create an entry for the airline – but instead of using the first name / last name method, set the airline (or hotel, or car hire chain) as the Company and tick the box so it will be listed under that name in your phone's address book.

Then enter your frequent flyer number in the Notes field. Don't try to put it into a telephone number field: not just because some membership numbers contain letters (which the address book might not allow in a number field), but because all sorts of wacky formatting can be applied to what the software thinks is a phone number.

Click Save and you've now got a contact card containing your frequent flyer number.

For bonus points, do a quick search on Google Images for the airline's logo and add this to the contact card for your loyalty membership.

(Many savvy travellers already have a card for their favourite airlines, hotel chains and care hire firms, with actual contact information such as the booking phone number and website – if you don't have that set up, now's as good a time as any.)

David Flynn

David Flynn is the Editor-in-Chief of Executive Traveller and a bit of a travel tragic with a weakness for good coffee, shopping and lychee martinis.