While buy now, pay later (BNPL) options offer opportunities for travelers to finance their trips, split payments allow travelers to pay using multiple payment methods.
According to Samuel Flynn, co-founder of Hands In, BNPL is “effectively a sexy credit card pioneered by Gen Z and millennials,” with firms such as Klarna acting as the lender.
“That’s not what we’re doing,” Flynn said during an interview in the PhocusWire studio at Phocuswright Europe 2026.
“The big problem set that we're trying to tackle for the travel industry is insufficient funds,” he said, adding that Hands In also enables groups to split payment across multiple participants.
“We work a lot with airlines ... you can sit together on a plane, book together and now you can split the payment together.”
When asked about how Hands In situates itself considering the rates of consumer debt, Flynn said that the company is more focused on adding an incremental revenue opportunity.
“It’s not a case of pushing people into more debt. That’s not what we do. We are really a technology layer allowing split-tender to take place,” he said. “The BNPL providers, for example, they’re the ones that’re going to be deciding on whether you get the loan; the credit card provider, [like] American Express, they will be the ones deciding that.”
Looking to the future with artificial intelligence (AI), Flynn said he anticipates these platforms playing a larger role in payments.
“You’re going to see a decentralization of providers into single source. The checkout with agentic is not going to be something that will exist. You’ll interact with some LLM and say, ‘I want to pay this way,’” Flynn said.
“Payment methods will be connected to the LLM, and it’ll be you that’s interacting with the LLM and deciding what method of which you want to pay with. Then the backend infrastructure will stay the same. But I think it's going to cannibalize a lot of payment infrastructure.”
Flynn also shared his thoughts on fragmentation in travel payments, blockchain, fraud concerns and more. Watch the full conversation with PhocusWire’s Linda Fox below.
Removing friction in travel payments