Marie Kondo has a best-selling book about decluttering, organizing, and simplifying your life. She talks a lot about how we accumulate a lot of stuff in our lives and how it’s often extremely hard to let things go. The result is that over time, we accumulate a lot of items that don’t spark joy in our lives anymore. She teaches to examine each item and see if it sparks joy. If it doesn’t, it’s time to thank it for it’s service and get rid of it.

I’ve been methodically going through my possessions and getting rid of things that really don’t need to be in my life anymore. Clothes, CDs, papers, and other things. It’s been quite liberating to lower the amount of clutter in my life.

This brings me to my hotel and airline loyalty cards. I have a binder where I keep all of the loyalty cards for my family – and the binder is stocked full. As I looked at it, I thought of my very first status – silver with Scandinavian Airlines. Getting that first card brought me a lot of joy but now, it’s a relic. There are tons of cards in there but the reality is that in this day, I haven’t used any of these physical cards in a long time. With the advent of AwardWallet – all of my bookings already have my loyalty number attached to the reservation and if they didn’t, a quick lookup on the Awardwallet app would solve that. So is there really any need for loyalty cards for me?

The only time I can think of in the last 3 years, was once when I needed to show my Platinum Delta card to get into a lounge overseas. Other than that – I haven’t used them. So the answer I gave myself was – my loyalty airline and hotel cards don’t bring me joy, so I’m going to get rid of the majority of them, and have one less thing taking up space in my household.

Goodbye loyalty wallet