Buy now, pay later's travel growth slowed sharply this summer, led by vacation rentals
Travelers started 4% more BNPL plans for trips in the third quarter, down from 35% more a year earlier, while BNPL as a whole kept growing. Vacation rentals, the biggest piece, went flat as Airbnb changed when its guests pay.
Buy now, pay later spent two years working its way onto travel checkout pages. This summer, the part card data can see stopped growing. Travelers started 4.0% more BNPL plans for travel in the third quarter than a year earlier, according to Arrivalist SpendInsights, after starting 34.9% more the year before. Card payments to BNPL lenders for travel came to about $1.67 billion, up 2.6%. In the first quarter they had grown 24%.
The rest of BNPL kept growing. Card payments to all BNPL lenders rose 16% in the third quarter. Within travel, the slowdown is concentrated in vacation rentals, almost all of them Airbnb stays, where new BNPL plans were flat (−0.4%) after growing 30% a year earlier.
Part of that is the market. BNPL as a whole slowed from 29% growth in the first quarter to 16% in the third. The slowdown shows up just as clearly in a fixed group of cardholders followed since January 2025, and at nearly every large lender, so it is not a quirk of our data. But travel slowed much more, from 24% to about 3%, close to the 2.2% growth of all travel card spending.
One caveat. One of the largest BNPL lenders does not name the merchant on card statements, so its travel lending is invisible in this data. Its own reports suggest its travel business is about as large as everything we can trace, and still growing. Counting it, travel BNPL probably grew by roughly 6% to 13% in the third quarter. That is still a sharp slowdown, but not a full stop.
Vacation rentals are most of it
Travel BNPL grew 14.2% in the third quarter of 2025 and 2.6% this year. Vacation rentals account for 10.3 points of that 11.6-point drop: a year ago they added 8.9 points of growth, this year they took away 1.4. The travel-only lender that finances many airline, cruise and package bookings accounts for another 2.3. Online travel agencies, airlines, cruise lines and the rest grew 26% together and added more growth than a year earlier, though from a base of only about $290 million a year earlier.
New plans tell the same story. Vacation rental plans were flat; other travel plans grew 8%, down from 39%, and first payments on them rose 19%.
Airbnb changed when its guests pay
On Aug. 14, 2025, Airbnb launched Reserve Now, Pay Later, which lets US guests book eligible stays with $0 upfront and pay before the free-cancellation window closes. By the fourth quarter, the company said, more than 70% of eligible bookings used it.
The option shows up in card data as a change in timing. Among Airbnb bookings paid in a single charge in May to July whose trip we could identify, 17.7% were charged 9 to 14 days before the trip this year, against 13.9% in 2025 and 13.8% in 2024. Reservations paid in two parts fell to 20.8% in the second quarter from 28.2% a year earlier. Airbnb's direct card charges, which grew 1% to 5% a year through November 2025, grew 8% to 16% a year from December 2025 to August 2026, partly because charges moved from booking months into trip months.
What the data does not yet show is guests trading a loan for the platform's option. The largest merchant-naming lender's share of card spending at Airbnb ran above the year before from January to April and below it every month since May. In the third quarter it fell to 5.24% from 5.91%, while total card spending at Airbnb grew 9%, and much of that drop may be the same shift in timing, with more of the summer's direct charges now landing in the summer. Over the 12 months to September, its share rose slightly, to 5.0% from 4.9%, and its Airbnb payments grew 13%. Vacation rental BNPL has stalled, but the data does not yet show it being replaced.
Younger travelers are most exposed
The slowdown matters most for younger travelers. Adults 18 to 24 put 47% of their travel BNPL into vacation rentals, against 29% for those 65 and over, who lean on the travel-only lender for flights, cruises and packages (56% of their travel BNPL). Younger adults are also still taking it up fastest: 0.72% of 18-to-24-year-olds made a travel BNPL payment in the third quarter, up from 0.63% a year earlier, the largest gain of any age group.
What to watch
Two things will show whether this is a pause or a turn. The lender that card data cannot trace reports its July to September results in early November, which will show how much its travel growth slowed. And the fourth quarter, once this summer's shift in payment timing has passed, will show whether vacation rental BNPL starts growing again or whether travelers have started to use the platform's own option instead of a loan.
For destinations, the takeaway is that BNPL's growth in travel has slowed sharply while the ways travelers put off paying multiply: booking platforms' own options, and lenders whose travel lending card data cannot see.
