This Young Entrepreneur Can Help You Make the Most of Frequent Travel Points

I had a problem. Actually, it was a problem shared by thousands of people who, like me, have thousands of frequent flyer miles awarded for years of putting up with the challenges of business travel. It used to be relatively easy to take advantage of these miles. You’d call the airline, tell them you wanted to use miles, and not dollars, to take your family to Hawaii. It’s not that easy anymore. What with the myriad rules and regulations, the blackout dates, the consolidation of airline and hotel reward programs and attending confusion about the points involved, it now requires an Excel spreadsheet, along with the patience of Job, to unravel the time-consuming algorithm of getting your just rewards rewarded.

As I said, I had a problem, which came to a tipping point when I tried to book airline reservations for our most recent family vacation using my miles. I asked the travel company who was assisting with the land arrangements if they could help. “We don’t do that anymore,” the company’s representative told me. “But, here’s a young man who does,” she said, giving me the young man’s name and cell phone number. A young man, and a cell phone number? The young man was Rob Karp, CEO and Founder of MilesAhead, a high-end travel advisory firm with a focus on reward point optimization and superior customer experience. Rob Karp, as it soon became apparent, was also a sophomore at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration who, in 2012 — when he was 14 years old — turned a passion for the travel business and a knack for helping harried executives (including his father) exchange frequent flyer miles and credit card points for travel into a bona fide and booming business.

All of a sudden, I had a solution to my problem. As a branding professional, I also recognized that I had on the phone a first-class example of someone who grasped the three most critical rules for building a successful brand, key among them, solving a problem for consumers. The best, most powerful brands in the world are such because they find a legitimate gap in the marketplace and fill this gap in a relevantly different way. They solve problems that matter to people and that make life better, as a result. Recognizing that most people wrangle with the frustrations of airline and credit card point systems, Karp and his collegiate team of colleagues focus on helping them navigate this system. And they do it exceedingly well, which is the second and equally important rule in brand-building. As Rob said to me when I spoke to him about his business, “Many people have great ideas to solve problems, but most suffer from an inability to execute brilliantly, to actually make it happen. What has allowed us to grow is our high level of service, our execution.”

It is its ability to deliver VIP treatment that has enabled MilesAhead to continue to grow into a company that works with hundreds of clients, including Fortune 500 companies and bookings north of 2 million a year . This, along with the third most important thing that successful brands do to stay successful brands. They anticipate the future needs of their clients or customers. They look ahead and shift ahead of impending issues in order to stay relevantly differentiated. While originally focusing on optimizing frequent-flyer points, Rob and his team realized that their clients were looking for optimized travel experiences, as a whole. So, they formed an alliance with a luxury travel agency to offer one-stop solution for all travel-related needs. “We’ll do anything from planning a 17-day safari to getting someone from New York to Los Angeles tomorrow night using only points,” Rob said.

Rob and his colleagues at MilesAhead are certainly learning a lot about the hospitality industry at Cornell. What seems to come naturally to them, however, is that identifying a genuine consumer problem, solving it well, and keeping an eye on future problems that may arise, are the real-time secrets to brand success. These are lessons from which anyone of any age in any category of business can benefit. I can only imagine that Rob Karp and team will continue to stay miles ahead of whatever competition they encounter.