Steven Hui always flies at the pointy end of an aircraft. It’s not that he’s loaded. Rather, he has cracked onto a system for using frequent flyer points after stacking up plenty of them while working at Macquarie Bank.
He set up iFLYflat seven years ago, and now shares his secrets by booking free business and first-class seats for customers of his travel agency. He’s leading the high life as a business owner, as those who follow his exploits can see from the frequent travel snaps he posts online.
“Because I’m accounting and finance minded, there’s nothing I like more than a bargain,” says Hui. “This seemed to be the biggest one of them of all. You can collect frequent flyer points for no effort and trade them for something really expensive. It’s a bit like alchemy. That’s when my bug for travel really started. Anywhere in the world became really achievable. If you use cash to fly business class, it’s expensive. But if you use points, you collect them for quite a low cost.”
It should come as no surprise that Hui is an accountant. Part of his former job at Macquarie was keeping the books for the bank’s investment in Sydney’s Hills Motorway, which leads into the city from his boyhood home in suburban Blacktown. It was while working part-time on a fruit stall at the nearby Parklea Markets that he developed his skills at arithmetic. “There was no time to use a calculator. If someone was buying $6.20 worth of fruit, six kilos of this times the price, and they gave me $10, I had to work out the change in my head. It was complicated.”
This story is from the December 2019 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
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This story is from the December 2019 edition of Money Magazine Australia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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