Is 迈生活 MilesLife on its last legs?

MilesLife. 迈生活 in Chinese. I’ve posted twice about them.

I was alerted to this by a Reddit post which links to what looks like a Weibo (Chinese Twitter) post by a partner merchant which suggests their China MilesLife office has now packed up.

I’m not confident enough in my Chinese comprehension to fully decipher what is being said, but what I have been able to gather is (roughly from the beginning to the end):

• MilesLife app is shutting up shop (倒闭了)
• We (the commenter/tweeter) are a partnering merchant and have been partnered with MilesLife since late Dec 2018
• Since we’ve been in partnership, we haven’t received a single cent of revenue from the partnership despite them owing us 50k (RMB, I assume)
• Today, we went to the office. Turns out employees have been advised of dissolution (员工都说被宜布解散了)?
• There were others chasing debt of 3mill (RMB?) in debt too
• No MilesLife boss in sight and they’re not answering their phones either

I’ve omitted bits that I couldn’t quite understand and phrases I was less sure of, but I think I more or less get the gist of what is being said, and hopefully my breakdown makes it clear enough too.

My initial reaction was, “ok, this could just be their China-side of the MilesLife business dying”, in a similar way to how Ofo and Obike have pretty much pulled out of Singapore (but yet they still exist elsewhere – i.e. not fully dead).

And then..

This happened when I attempted to check in.

It’s pretty concerning. If I had not seen the Reddit post, I would have assumed it was a temporary technical fault/glitch and probably wouldn’t have put much thought into it, but putting two and two together – it honestly doesn’t paint a particularly positive outlook/picture for MilesLife.

I hope I’m wrong – for selfish reasons (admittedly) more than anything – that is, consumers having more choice is never a bad thing, and I’ve found the miniscule weekly top up of miles useful enough to not want it to disappear. They only recently onboarded Qantas Frequent Flyer (March 2019, if I’m not mistaken), which shows growth/ambition, so this seems oddly timed.

Anyway – time will tell, but in the meantime, as the Reddit post suggests, use up any MilesLife money you have ASAP!