He traveled the world on frequent flyer miles, now his app helps others do it

Mileslife founder and CEO Troy Liu happy to take hitchhikers on a drive in West Africa. Photo credit: Troy Liu.

Troy Liu went to the US when he was 17. He was a student of economics at UCLA. On his first trip home to China, the girl at the airport counter asked him if he wanted to be a member of the airline’s frequent flyer program. “What’s that for?” he asked her.

The young Chinese student had never heard of frequent flyer miles which could be redeemed for free air tickets.

Mileslife just won the Phocuswright competition for travel tech innovators from across Asia.

“Whenever you hear the word ‘free,’ it’s pretty much like a joke. So I didn’t believe it, but I got a frequent flyer card, anyway,” he tells me in his irrepressible manner. We are in the lobby of a hotel in Gurgaon, near Delhi, where his startup Mileslife has just won a competition for travel tech innovators from across Asia, conducted by global travel market research firm Phocuswright. Today, Troy has traveled to more than a hundred countries and helps others, too, get free air tickets with frequent flyer miles from multiple airlines aggregated on his Mileslife app.

It all started with that frequent flyer card he picked up skeptically from the airport counter girl. The next year, he handed over the card when he was again going home to China, and miles were added to it. One day, the Chinese student called up the airline and asked if he could get a free ticket and got a shock to hear he could. “Wow, there’s really something for free,” he thought. “The world changed for me. I started to study all the airline miles programs, and became addicted,” Troy tells Tech in Asia.

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The miles addict

He first started flying around the US – notching up miles and collecting cheap tickets. “I was still in school, so I had time. Nothing much else to do, right?”

He became an auditor after graduating and had to make frequent trips between San Francisco and Washington. Between that and trips home to China, the miles kept adding up. His sightseeing turned global.

“When you collect miles, you need to redeem, right? Not put them in a deposit. They devalue,” he explains to me.

So he started doing some elaborate trips. He recollects a good one: Shenzhen to Seoul, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Madagascar, South Africa, the Middle East, Paris, and on to the US.

Eight years ago, he went back to live and work in China. He started writing a blog at the side on his travels, which were becoming more an exploration of local cultures. One of these was a bike trip across India.

“I like to talk to local people. I don’t like sightseeing points any more,” he tells me in his characteristically quick, short lines. “In Gambia, there were a lot of police checkpoints. I got very tired of them. So I let three African women hitchhike a ride in my car. No more problems with police!”

Inevitably, he started passing tips on using frequent flyer miles to followers of his Chinese travel blog. He became such an expert over time that airlines started consulting him on designing their frequent flyer programs better. “Because I was an internet celebrity … hahaha … just kidding.”

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