Recent Blog Posts
-
The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
Apr 27 20099:04am EDT -
Sinking Animal Spirits
Apr 27 20098:04am EDT -
Counter-cyclical Urban Policy
Apr 26 200910:04am EDT -
Be Your Own Counterfeiter
Apr 26 20099:04am EDT -
Being Tim Geithner
Apr 25 200912:04pm EDT -
Notes From a Press Conference Naif
Apr 25 20099:04am EDT -
What Good is the News?
Apr 25 20098:04am EDT -
Stressful Enough
Apr 24 20092:04pm EDT -
Not Regretting the Pound
Apr 24 20091:04pm EDT -
Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
Non-Economic Questions of the Day
Apr 24 20099:04am EDT -
The Stress Test Blind Alley
Apr 24 20098:04am EDT -
Happy Hour
Apr 23 20099:04pm EDT -
Recovery Without Rebalancing
Apr 23 20096:04pm EDT -
The Shape of Your Recession
Apr 23 20095:04pm EDT
Links
- Felix Salmon
- DealBreaker
- Ryan Avent: The Bellows
- The Epicurean Dealmaker
- Chris Anderson
- Ultimi Barbarorum
- MarketBeat
- Michelle Leder
- John Quiggin
- The Panelist
- Andrew Leonard
- Streetsblog
- Brad Setser
- Michael Mandel
- Financial Crookery
- Kash Mansori
- Dean Baker
- Calculated Risk
- Free Exchange
- Curbed
- Lance Knobel
- Econospeak
- Carbon Tax Center
- Overcoming Bias
- Mark Thoma
- Naked Capitalism
- Alphaville
- Barry Ritholtz
- Alexander Campbell
- The Bayesian Heresy
- Brad DeLong
- DealBook
- Greg Mankiw
- Deal Journal
- FP Passport
- Carl Bialik
- Marginal Revolution
- A Fistful of Euros
- Dan Gross
JetBlue Pushes PayPal Option
As we saw with Frontier, airlines are at risk not only from high jet fuel prices but also from their credit card companies, who have the right to unilaterally hold back a very large percentage of any airline's cashflow. I'm quite sure that's the reason that offers like this one are now appearing: if you pay for your JetBlue plane ticket with PayPal rather than a credit card, they'll immediately give you $20 cash back straight into your PayPal account.
The present offer is quite restrictive: they're doing this for the first 4,500 customers only, and only once per customer, and you need to fly in the next two months. But if it proves popular, and if their credit card company starts making growling noises, expect to see much more along these lines in future. (I suspect one reason for the restrictions is that the airlines have promised the credit-card companies that the cost of buying a plane ticket will not be contingent on the means of payment. But that promise has gone out the window for low-cost airlines in Europe, and it might not last forever in the US, either.)
Should consumers take JetBlue up on its offer? As a rule, no. The insurance you get by paying with a credit card is valuable; PayPal, debit cards, and the like are essentially cash, and come with no insurance at all. $20 cashback is attractive, and it's hard to put a dollar value on insurance, but it's definitely worth knowing what you're giving up when you take that route.
