A wise customer looks at all the options before making a purchase, and I’m not just talking about looking at options for the specific product you want to buy.

I’m also talking about looking at the fees involved in making the purchase.

In today’s story, one airline passenger looks closely at all the payment options for airline tickets and comes up with a money saving strategy for the customer that could be a problem for the airline.

Let’s read all the details.

Airline tried to charge me for their transaction processing fee of <1%. Instead, I had it so they paid ~5% and I paid 0%.

I purchased some tickets online from a well known airline.

When going to make the payment, they offered me a few options with different transaction processing fees.

0.97% for payments with a credit card

0.55% for payments with a debit card

0.97% for PayPal and PayPal Pay in 4 transactions.

0% if you do an interest free payment plan with a well known “buy now, pay later with no interest”* company

The last option isn’t necessarily free, but it can be.

*There is a $10 a month account fee if you have a balance owing at the end of the month, no fee if you don’t.

So what I did is take the interest free payment plan.

There is nothing stopping you paying this off early.

I Immediately paid it off in full so that I would not get the $10 monthly account fee, so I literally paid nothing except the cost of the tickets.

It was a loss for the airline but not for the customer.

If you know how these interest free things work, technically there is interest, but (assuming the customer pays on time) the merchant pays for it, not the customer.

I looked a bit later on and it seems this company charges the merchant ~5%.

So unless this airline has some really good arrangement, they probably got a ~5% cut taken from them, and I never paid any transaction processing fees.

I don’t know that this is really malicious compliance.

This is just a smart airline travel hack.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person is grateful for no fees.

Yeah, this isn’t really malicious.

Using a credit card might actually be a better deal.

This is a very good point.

What seems like the best deal may not actually be the best deal.

Always take a second look.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.