Do You Actually Know How Many Points You Have?

Over the years, just in the Facebook group, especially as it's grown, or even not even just limited to us, but other websites, Reddit, just any sort of forum or community, people have kind of yearned for and looked for a way to share information about their trips and their actual redemptions that they've taken.

Obviously, this hobby is overwhelming and a lot to manage, and not only your cards and all that kind of stuff too, but the way you're actually using your points is

Yeah, I was definitely in the spreadsheet camp for a while, but I was constantly finding that like I would have one spreadsheet that would work perfectly for one trip that I took.

And then I'd redeem points a different way or like use a different type of free night certification or something.

And then it would just like blow a hole in my spreadsheet and I'd be like, okay, well now I have all these random notes in this right-hand column and it's really hard to go back and reference and.

make any kind of educated assessment of like, how did I do on that trip? Because you can't.

Oh, for

sure.

It's just, it's messy.

I mean, I'm not the best Excel person.

I'm not claiming to be, so I'm sure other people might have a one-up on me.

Back in the day when I used to write articles more regularly for our site, I would track it just kind of in a notes document because it's like, oh, i know i'm going to write an article about our australia trip that's coming up i need to log all the stuff here so i have enough information for an article that works great for that but not just general purpose and know-how i kind of like to think the like the cobbler that doesn't have any kind of shoes you know type full theory or philosophy uh here or you know obviously i'm traveling i'm using points whatever i kind of work in the space but I don't have a quick list of, hey, here's all the places I've been, how I use it, all that kind of stuff.

People would share stuff.

It's always in a different format.

Some people would write novels on Facebook posts, but obviously that's not easily scannable.

It can be great content, but people might want it in a bite-sized chunk and then additional context if they have it.

Or, of course, people would sometimes make their own version of a spreadsheet, but then you run into issues with the – quality and consistency of the data entry or everything's in a different format, or some people might include this information or some might not.

So, uh, there's not like a ton of consistency or a worst case.

Somebody puts all this time into building a Google spreadsheet, but then the sharing settings are wrong.

So they like share this link and then nobody can

get into it.

So, yeah.

And then you have 375,000 people tagging you going, can you, can you give me edit access? Thanks.

Yep.

Look, I'm going to be fair here to the spreadsheet people because a lot of you are spreadsheet people and I'm a spreadsheet person.