dLocal and Alternative Airlines partner on flexible payments for travel bookings in emerging markets
dLocal (NASDAQ: DLO), the leading cross-border payment platform connecting global merchants to emerging markets, has partnered with Alternative Airlines, the global flight search and booking site, working with the world’s leading airlines, to give travelers in emerging markets the option to book flights now and pay over time.
Airfares and travel packages are the kind of high-ticket purchases where installments matter most. In countries like Brazil, that expectation is already built into consumer behavior: parcelado, the country’s decades-old habit of splitting purchases into monthly payments, accounts for more than half of all credit card spending. But across emerging markets in general, only around 10-15% of consumers own a credit card at all, so the travelers who most need a way to spread out a fare are often the ones without a card that can do it. For an Online Travel Agency operating across dozens of countries, closing that gap one lender and one contract at a time is neither fast nor easy to repeat.
For Alternative Airlines, this partnership is more than a single integration. Their model is built around making travel more accessible by letting customers fly now and pay over time, and BNPL Fuse, dLocal’s solution combining leading local BNPL providers via a single integration, brings exactly that flexibility. Travelers can spread the cost of a flight or travel package over time instead of paying it all upfront, while Alternative Airlines collects full payment right away and carries no payment risk.
Through Fuse, the company now offers Addi and Pagaleve, leading local Buy Now, Pay Later providers in Colombia and Brazil respectively, via one API integration and one contract. The same setup gives Alternative Airlines a path to BNPL Fuse’s wider network, which currently spans eight countries and reaches over 500 million potential buyers, with more markets and local providers to come.
Looking ahead, the two businesses plan to build on this foundation and move into markets where the habit to pay in parts is already familiar to consumers: Chile, Pakistan, and countries across Asia and Africa. In each of these markets, outbound travel demand is growing faster than credit card penetration, which is precisely the mismatch BNPL Fuse is designed to close.
“Making travel accessible has always meant more than just search and price, it means giving people a real way to afford the trip,” said Sam Argyle, Managing Director at Alternative Airlines. “BNPL Fuse lets us bring that same flexibility to markets where a credit card was never part of the equation, without having to build a relationship with every local lender ourselves.”
“Travel is one of the clearest cases for Buy Now, Pay Later in emerging markets, because the price tag is bigger and the decision takes more thought,” said Clarice Leaman, Alternative Payments Operations Lead at dLocal. “Alternative Airlines already thinks about consumer affordability the way we do. Our job is to make sure that mindset works the same way in Bogotá as it does in São Paulo, and eventually everywhere else they fly.”
