A New Class of Buy Now, Pay Later: From Checkout Utility to Enterprise Growth Lever

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Travelers are still making room for trips, even as rising prices force them to plan more carefully. U.S. airfares were nearly 27% higher in June than a year earlier, according to the U.S. Travel Association. Additionally, Skift Research found that 63% of travelers globally expect to increase their travel spending over the next 12 months, underscoring both the resilience of travel demand and the growing pressure on affordability.

For travel brands, that resilience creates a familiar tension: They need to give customers more flexibility in how they plan and pay for higher-value trips without weakening the customer relationships they have spent years building.

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) and other financing tools are moving into that gap. The more strategic question is whether financing can be configured around the larger goals travel brands already care about, including customer acquisition, premium product adoption, loyalty participation, repeat purchases, and long-term customer value.

Bringing Financing Into the Travel Ecosystem

The strategic role of financing is especially visible in aviation, where airlines already operate around connected systems: fare families, ancillaries, loyalty programs, co-brand cards, upgrades, revenue management, and personalization. 

ClarityPay, a provider of tailored point-of-sale credit solutions, recently announced a partnership with JetBlue that gives eligible customers personalized installment options while they shop and allows them to continue earning TrueBlue points on eligible purchases. Later this year, customers will also be able to earn incremental TrueBlue points through the program. The companies described it as a “first-of-its-kind program” that connects embedded financing across the airline’s booking ecosystem while also integrating loyalty and personalization strategies.

For Houman Motaharian, CEO of ClarityPay, the announcement reflects a broader change in how travel brands are thinking about financing, a topic he discussed during a recent episode of Airline Weekly Lounge.

“We think brand control is going to be paramount in this new world,” Motaharian said. “Merchants need to control both their brand and their customer data. The proof is in co-brand credit cards. Those programs have become a significant source of revenue for airlines and other travel brands, and we believe that trend will continue. We think BNPL can play a similar role by becoming fully integrated into a brand’s loyalty ecosystem.” 

Motaharian sees integrated financing as a broader growth lever across that commercial infrastructure, complementing co-brand card programs, supporting sales of airline products, services, and third-party ancillaries, and creating more value across the customer relationship.

For years, most BNPL products in travel have appeared late in the customer journey. A traveler selects a flight, hotel stay, cruise, or package, reaches checkout, and then sees a financing option alongside cards and other payment methods. That can improve conversion, but it limits financing to a narrow moment after many of the most valuable decisions have already been made.

ClarityPay is trying to move that moment upstream and surface personalized pay-over-time options while customers are still shopping, so lower installment payment options can appear as travelers compare flights, evaluate dates, consider upgrades, add ancillaries, or plan a larger trip. The program is designed to support travelers across a broad range of credit profiles, offering installment terms ranging from six weeks to 48 months. Personalized financing options are presented to customers as they shop, with transparent terms displayed before they commit. 

Financing can influence whether a customer chooses a better cabin, adds flexibility, includes insurance, or keeps more of the trip within the brand’s ecosystem.

“For travel companies, this turns financing from a payment feature into part of the merchandising strategy,” Motaharian said.

Who Owns the Customer Relationship?

The deeper issue is control. When a third-party financing provider owns the customer relationship, the travel brand risks creating value for someone else’s ecosystem. In categories built around loyalty and repeat engagement, that tradeoff matters.

“We give the airlines brand control at the end of the day,” Motaharian said. “Instead of handing off the consumer relationship to the lender, we’re keeping that relationship with the airline.”

This is the essence of ClarityPay’s pitch to travel brands. The company describes itself as a white-label solution, with branding, data, loyalty, and financing configured to align with the merchant’s goals and loyalty strategies. Merchants control how financing appears within their own customer journey, whether under ClarityPay’s brand or the merchant’s own pay-over-time experience.

For airlines, the comparison point is co-brand credit cards. Those programs are not simply payment products. They are loyalty engines, acquisition tools, data assets, and major financial ecosystems. Motaharian believes financing needs to move in a similar direction.

“We think BNPL can actually play a big role in being more than just a payment infrastructure,” he said. “It can also become a loyalty play.”

What JetBlue’s Financing Strategy Reveals

ClarityPay’s newly announced partnership with JetBlue gives eligible customers personalized installment options. Customers who book through JetBlue using ClarityPay continue to earn TrueBlue points on eligible purchases, with incremental earning opportunities launching later this year.

The financing product is designed to strengthen the loyalty relationship by keeping the payment experience connected to the brand’s rewards ecosystem. For JetBlue, flexible payments become part of a broader commercial infrastructure rather than a separate checkout feature.

“We set out to give our customers a best-in-class pay later solution,” said Ed Pouthier, vice president of loyalty and personalization at JetBlue. “ClarityPay listened and delivered, tailoring the program to our needs and building a solution that increases value to our customers, grows sales, and expands our loyalty ecosystem.”

The JetBlue example also points to a larger opportunity for hotels, cruise lines, travel agencies, vacation clubs, and other experience brands facing the same challenge. They want customers to say yes to the trip, the upgrade, the membership, the add-on, or the next purchase without losing the relationship to a financing brand that may later market competing products.

Protecting the Co-Brand Ecosystem

For airlines, any financing strategy must also coexist with co-brand cards. A poorly designed BNPL program could shift spend away from valuable cardholders. A more strategic one can identify where financing is incremental, where a co-brand card offer makes more sense, and which options should be presented to different customer segments.

Segmentation is critical. Some customers prefer installment payments. Some want card rewards. Some may not qualify for a co-brand card. Others may be small-business travelers who need a dedicated travel line for repeat purchases.

Motaharian said ClarityPay can support credit lines of up to $50,000 for qualified borrowers, expanding the use case beyond a single leisure booking. “It’s not a question of affordability,” he said. “It’s really a question of segmentation.”

That distinction matters. Financing is often reduced to a budget-traveler tool, but in travel, it can serve a wider range of behaviors: stretching a premium trip over time, choosing a higher cabin, managing business travel cash flow, or preserving card capacity for other expenses. Effective underwriting should account for these different customer motivations and purchasing contexts.

Financing as a Revenue Management Lever

Financing can also give commercial teams another way to stimulate demand without immediately discounting the product.

Motaharian offered a simple airline example: A $1,000 ticket could be discounted to $900, or the airline could offer a 0% APR¹ installment plan that makes the purchase more attractive while preserving the fare.

“The choice is whether to use pay-later offerings to make the purchase more attractive or discount the ticket,” he said. “It becomes a revenue management tool at the end of the day.”

Here, financing starts to look more like a retailing strategy. The question becomes which customer should see which offer, when they should see it, how that offer supports the brand’s broader economics, and how much visibility and control the travel brand has over financing costs, margins, and customer value. 

How Trusted Data Sharing Changes the Equation

The next layer is data and personalization. Credit bureau data can show how a consumer handles certain debts, but it does not capture the full context of a traveler’s relationship with an airline, hotel, cruise line, or other travel brand.

A frequent flyer, repeat guest, vacation club member, or small business traveler may look different when merchant data is included. That can affect eligibility, line size, offer structure, and future marketing.

“The data play is huge,” Motaharian said. “If I know you are a frequent flyer member with JetBlue and you fly them two or three times a year, that completely changes my view about your relationship and my view on underwriting.”

For Motaharian, the value is more relevant data. Merchant relationship data can help financing partners understand customer behavior that traditional credit models may not capture.

Trust also matters. ClarityPay’s model is built around the idea that merchants are more willing to share data when the financing partner is not monetizing that customer data or using it to cross-sell competing products.

The Next Phase of Travel Financing

For travel brands, financing is becoming a more strategic decision. Partners will increasingly be judged not only by approval and checkout conversion rates, but also by their ability to strengthen the brand’s ecosystem across loyalty, data, personalization, and customer value.

The old version of travel financing answered one question: Can this customer pay over time? 

The next version must answer a more valuable one: Can financing help the brand acquire the right customers, deepen those relationships, and create more value over time?

Explore ClarityPay to learn how the right technology and data can enable an enterprise-level, loyalty-integrated financing solution while easing change management. 

This sponsored content was created collaboratively by ClarityPay and Skift Studio.