You can now pay for your Jetstar flights with Afterpay
Afterpay for flights just took off.
Afterpay has announced a partnership with budget airline Jetstar, allowing customers to purchase their flights now and pay for them in four interest-free instalments later.
For those of you not yet in the know, Afterpay works in a similar way to lay-by, only you get to take home your purchases before you finish paying for them. It has partnered with hundreds of online retailers so far, but this Jetstar venture marks its inaugural entrance into the travel industry.
Available from today, as part of its pilot programme Afterpay can only be used on domestic flights, though there are plans to roll it out on international flights in the near future. With it you can purchase both flights and related products such as seat selection, meals and checked-luggage, though it's restricted to spends of $200 to $1,000 excluding payment fee.
Flights have to be booked at least eight weeks prior to travel. This is most likely to ensure that you pay off your purchase prior to boarding as repayments are taken fortnightly.
There's also a non-refundable payment fee of $10 on Afterpay purchases with Jetstar. This fee is not a standard with other Afterpay retailers who don't charge the customer for its use. It's also quite a steep fee when compared with other payment options with Jetstar (e.g. credit card) which are calculated as a percentage of your total fare price rather than being a set amount.
If you're booking a $1,000 flight using the most expensive payment option (credit card at 1.1%) you're looking at an $11 fee which comes just ahead of Afterpay. But if you're looking at a $200 flight you'll only have to pay $2.20 to use your credit card. Calculated, anything under $909 is better on credit if you want to save on fees.
It's also important to note that if you don't make your fortnightly repayments with Afterpay, you will be slammed with a late-payment fee and your account will be locked until you settle it. There's also a maximum cap of $2,000 that you can have on your account at any one time.
If you think that the decision by Afterpay to choose Jetstar as its first travel partner was a conscious one, you're not wrong. With millennials at the core of the Afterpay market, Jetstar's group chief officer Jayne Hrdlicka says that "many of Jetstar's customers already use Afterpay to purchase items at retailers and are familiar with the flexibility of paying over time", making it an obvious choice.
Head of Afterpay Nick Molnar agrees saying: "There has been a clear shift in millennials share of the wallet towards service industries and more specifically towards travel. At Afterpay, we are focused on offering Afterpay for life's little luxuries and we believe the demand for Afterpay in the travel market will be very strong."
Jetstar is not the first airline or travel agency to offer a buy now, pay later scheme with and also boasting their own programs to allow greater payment flexibility on travel.
