High Flyer

Steven Hui Travel expert and co-founder of frequent flyer booking service iFLYflat. Age 43; married; lives in Sydney’s Chatswood; family migrated from China. First experience at saving was a school Dollarmites account. Bought shares thinking he could make more than cash in the bank, but says he wasn’t good at it. Reinvests in his business. Leisure is important: “I’m not earning as I used to, but I have a much better lifestyle.” He and wife Anna don’t have kids, and he doesn’t focus on building assets.

- Alan Deans

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.”