Australians are spending more than $21 billion on business travel this year. Connecting globally, in person is essential for many Australian companies seeking to grow a global business by gaining access to investments and new opportunities. Yet this essential travel comes with a price tag.
Ask anyone, and they would prefer to travel in business class to benefit from the increased productivity, the reduction in stress and being able to arrive fresh to do their best work.
However, business class airfares are expensive and many companies are adopting economy class travel policies as standard.
Some believe that if there was a way to make business class more affordable, then Australian companies would be in a superior position to win more deals in global markets and grow our economy.
In 2013, Steve Hui, an exaccountant, founded the reward travel business iFLYflat to help individuals and businesses collect more points and use points to fly smarter. Known as ‘The Points Whisperer’, Mr Hui and his team provide tailored advice to businesses to financially engineer the use of reward points to reduce the costs of business class travel.
According to M Hui, most businesses have yet to see the potential value of points as they haven’t had the advantages fully explained to them, including the fact that it can be up to 70% cheaper to use those points to ‘pay’ for business class.
“It is all in the numbers, and being an accountant, this was all very natural to me,” Mr Hui says.
He says that getting the right card is only the first step in a points solution.
The key is knowing exactly which business cards will help your company to collect more of the ‘right’ frequent flyer points. Using the right card to settle the operating expenses that they are already paying via EFT, such as paying suppliers, office, utilities and rent, marketing, contractors and even paying taxes. And then using the right points structure to fly.” Mr Hui said.
He says airline frequent flyer alliance structures are complex.
“Collecting the ‘right’ points means using the lowest points for that trip, or one that has a natural stopover in the right city without additional fees, or is known to have seats for the 4 staff you want to be flying together,” he says.
“The ‘aha’ moment for some clients is when they realised they had been missing out completely on free points – and flights – for years. Adding up to tens of thousands of dollars, wasted.”
Mr Hui says the every business can benefit from reward points at some level. Airline reward and credit programs he says are complex for a reason, the programs don’t want you to get the most value out of them as it ruins their business model, rewards points is a massive business.
“Collecting the points is the first trick. But how will you redeem them is another.
Mr Hui says he is solving this ‘redemption problem’ with the Flight Booking Concierge Team, where they help people who have the points find the best reward seat. Looking after the whole booking process.”
