Skift Travel News Blog

Travelers booking flights and hotels from Expedia in a co-branded feature in the Afterpay app can now choose to pay in four interest-free payments over six weeks, Expedia announced.

“Expedia Group is proud to become Afterpay’s first major U.S. travel partner,” said Senior Vice President Media and Brand Partnerships Christian Gerron, Expedia Group. “This highlights our ongoing growth in developing cutting-edge traveler technologies that provide our partners with new ways to deliver great experiences to their customers which, in turn, drive customer loyalty.”

Nerdwallet said Afterpay charges late fees, and puts customer accounts on hiatus after a missed payment, but doesn’t transfer customers to collection agencies.

“Expedia Group also plans to expand this initiative with additional brands in the future,” Expedia said.

China’s Trip.com has struck two new partnerships, covering the UK and Asia Pacific, to give customers the opportunity to delay or spread out payments for their purchases.

In Asia Trip.com has joined forces with Atome, while in the UK it will use Klarna.

Trip.com bookers in the UK will see Klarna as an additional payment option when they arrive at check-out, where they’ll be able to choose one of three payment options: pay the full amount immediately, pay the full amount within 30 days, or pay in three installments over 60 days.

Trip.com’s Atome partnership will first only be available in Singapore, before other Asia Pacific regions in 2023.

In the face of a squeezed household budgets, buy now pay later schemes are becoming more popular. They tend to be common when buying bigger ticket items, like a vacation, but even food delivery platforms are looking to split payments for customers.

Klarna claims its short-term, interest and fee and fee free credit products deliver positive outcomes for consumers, with extremely low default rates of “well below 1 percent”.

“Klarna assesses a consumer’s ability to repay on each purchase, taking a real time view of someone’s financial circumstances which means using Klarna is never guaranteed,” it said.The company restricts the use of its services if consumers miss a payment to prevent debt building up.

Trip.com offers 1.2 million hotels and flights from 480 airlines.

Affirm, the public buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) fintech company just reported its latest quarterly earnings, and some hint that BNPL is being rapidly adopted by the suppliers in travel AND increasing usage by the travelers. From the earnings call transcript: “The Travel and Ticketing segment has been outperforming expectations, and volume more than doubled year over year. Our long-term partners, Expedia, Vrbo and Priceline were all in the top 10 by volume in Q3. The quarter also marked the general availability of Affirm on American Airlines and the launch of our very first Canadian travel merchant…Travel and Ticketing increased to $390 million, up 122% from last year, topping last quarter’s high mark. With the recent easing of mask mandates and travel restrictions, we see extraordinary demand to book travel now and pay over time with Affirm. We also remain enthusiastic about consumer demand for live events.”