Joe Lu has a simple problem with loyalty programmes. You earn for months, sometimes years, working towards a reward that may be devalued, unavailable, or simply not worth the wait by the time you get there. The goalpost, as he puts it, can move at any time.
So he decided to move it first.
HeyMax, the Singapore-based travel loyalty platform Lu co-founded, has just launched HeyMax First, a membership programme that inverts the traditional earn-then-redeem model entirely. The idea is straightforward: fly first, earn later. Take the miles now, book the trip now, and spend your everyday transactions earning it back.
“It’s always a future promise or speculative value,” Lu says of the conventional loyalty model. “Whether it’s your miles, your hotel points, your bank points, your supermarket points – it’s all, hey, here’s some future promise. Why don’t you earn it? And then once you earn it, we’ll give you some value back. So we’re going to flip that.”
The problem with loyalty as it stands
The frustrations Lu is targeting are familiar to anyone who has tried to redeem a business class flight on a legacy frequent flyer programme. Availability is scarce. Devaluations happen without warning. And the sheer time required to accumulate meaningful points – often a year or more of consistent spending – means consumers are perpetually deferring a reward they may never actually take.
“At any point, especially nowadays with any loyalty programmes, they can devalue. They can take away certain benefits,” Lu says. “As a consumer, you’re working towards something and then the rug pull can happen anytime.”
HeyMax First addresses this by giving members early access to up to one million Max Miles, transferable one-to-one to more than 30 leading airlines and hotels loyalty programmes – before they have earned them.
Members pay a modest early access fee, currently around 2.3 Singapore cents per mile advanced, which is fully refunded once they earn the miles back through everyday spending. The membership itself is free in its first year for the first 10,000 members in Singapore.
Isn’t this similar to buy-now-pay-later models, I asked? Lu is careful to distinguish it. This is loyalty currency, not debt. “It’s something that’s meant to be free anyway,” he says. “We’re just offering the free value upfront.”
The longer-term vision is more ambitious. Lu draws a direct parallel with credit cards. Nobody today thinks twice about spending on credit and settling at the end of the month. He believes the same normalisation can happen with loyalty miles. “The future is that I think everyone will be comfortable being a little bit negative on their miles – negative 100,000 miles, just earning it back next year. But it means I really used them.”
In that future, it would be the bank or card issuer, not the consumer, absorbing the early access cost – paying it as a customer acquisition and engagement benefit, as part of a co-branded card proposition that gives members instant access to a meaningful miles balance. “Imagine next year we co-launch a card which gives you an unbeatable value proposition – instant access to a million miles upfront,” Lu says.
Who it’s for
Lu has two very specific customer profiles in mind for the Singapore launch, both of which illuminate exactly where the current loyalty system fails people.
The first he calls the “disgruntled frequent flyer” – someone who has accumulated substantial miles but cannot find availability to use them. HeyMax First’s response: access Max Miles now, and the platform will find you a business class seat across its full network of 20-plus airlines, rather than locking you into a single carrier whose inventory may be exhausted.
The second profile is the Singapore newly-wed couple who just secured a BTO (Build to order) flat. This, Lu observes, is typically the moment people first seriously engage with the miles game – a honeymoon to plan, major renovation spending incoming, sign-up bonuses to harvest. “Instead of earn for a year, then speculatively, later, you can book for your honeymoon now,” he says. Or, as HeyMax has taken to calling it, a mini-moon.
The $14 million and what it buys
Since founding in January 2023, HeyMax has raised a total of $14 million – the funds are being spent on three things in parallel: product and technology development, market expansion, and the capital to run experiments that prove the model works.
On the product side, the funds are enabling deeper investment in AI – both for the consumer-facing booking experience and for an internal operating system Lu calls MaxOS, HeyMax’s centralised AI agent that connects the company’s communications, channels, and workflows into a single nervous system.
With four engineers as co-founders, HeyMax has built an organisation where, as Lu describes it, everyone connects to the agent rather than to each other – automating the routine, flagging the critical, and keeping headcount flat even as business volume grows.
On the AI product roadmap, Lu is building toward an agentic booking experience. The near-term version: a platform that aggregates award availability across all supported airlines, presents it clearly, and guides users through a points transfer and booking.
The longer-term version: an agent that watches quietly in the background for the business class seat to Sydney that opens up during school holidays, and books it when it does.
“You just give it all the criteria. It will look out for you the entire time,” Lu says. He estimates this is roughly a year away from public launch, dependent partly on how quickly consumers become comfortable delegating travel decisions to AI agents.
Market expansion is the third use of funds. HeyMax is already operating in Singapore and Hong Kong, with Australia, Taiwan and Japan the next markets on the roadmap.
The bigger thesis: Loyalty that works for you
Step back from the mechanics of HeyMax First, the market expansion, and the AI roadmap, and a single animating idea connects all of it: the belief that loyalty should work for the consumer, not the other way around.
“We want to get your banks or airlines or all these to be loyal to you, rather than you needing to be loyal to them,” Lu says.
In a world where switching costs are collapsing, where AI agents will increasingly shop around on a customer’s behalf regardless of brand allegiance, and where the walled gardens that loyalty programmes have always relied on are becoming harder to maintain, Lu thinks the brands that will win are those that earn trust rather than engineer lock-in.
HeyMax First, launching this quarter in Singapore with a target of 100,000 members in year one, is his opening move. The Fly-First-Earn-Later model, the agentic booking assistant, the AI-native operating model, the market expansion – they all point toward the same destination: a travel loyalty platform built around what the traveller actually wants.
Which, it turns out, is to fly first and figure out the rest later.
