For most online travel platforms, price remains the primary lever to attract customers. Laters.com, however, believes the next opportunity lies in how travellers pay for their trips.
The Singapore-based travel platform, formerly known as Fly Fairly, has built its proposition around a different question: how do travellers want to pay for a trip?
The company believes that question is becoming increasingly important as younger travellers develop different financial habits. Millennials have emerged as a major holder of cryptocurrency, while Gen Z has shown a strong preference for buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) products rather than traditional credit cards.
For Laters.com Founder and CEO Alex Yardley, the opportunity lies at the intersection of those changing payment preferences and an increasingly expensive travel market.
“Affordability and price are not synonymous,” he said in an interview with TNGlobal during Stripe Tour Singapore 2026.
That distinction is central to Laters.com’s’ strategy. The company is attempting to make travel more accessible by giving customers more ways to pay.
Building a travel platform around payments
The company has been operating for about two years according to Yardley. He said the business initially emerged from the observation that online travel had seen relatively little fundamental change since the rise of metasearch engines.
While metasearch does transform how travellers discovered and compared prices, the payment experience remained largely unchanged.
Laters.com saw an opening among younger consumers whose payment preferences were increasingly diverging from the traditional credit-card model.
The company’s research found strong interest among Gen Z in BNPL, partly driven by concerns around revolving credit-card debt. Splitting a purchase into instalments, the founder argued, can provide a more predictable way of managing a large expense.
For cryptocurrency holders, meanwhile, the issue is different: how to spend digital assets without converting them into fiat currency.
Those trends overlap significantly with the airline market. Millennials and Gen Z account for roughly two-thirds of online flight sales, according to the founder.
“Two-thirds of online flight sales are millennials and Gen Z,” Yardley noted. “But nobody was catering to their specific preferences.”
Laters.com also positioned itself around what it describes as “freedom of payment” — combining a broad supply network with a wide range of payment options.
The platform now has access to more than 650 airlines and supports more than 100 payment methods across 16 markets, Yardley said.
“Today, it’s two sides of the equation,” he said. “One is on supplier aggregation. The other is on the payment side.”
A fragmented payments landscape
Building a global travel platform, however, has meant dealing with a payments ecosystem that remains anything but global.
There is no single checkout experience that works seamlessly everywhere, according to Yardley. Payment preferences vary significantly between markets, particularly across Southeast Asia, where digital wallets have gained considerable traction.
The region’s payments landscape is also highly fragmented, requiring companies to integrate and orchestrate multiple local payment methods.
That has made payments one of the most difficult parts of Laters.com’s technology stack.
Stripe has been central to that infrastructure since the company’s early days, according to Yardley.
“Stripe has been central to our payment orchestration stack since day one,” he said.
Stablecoins move from experiment to conversion tool
Among those payment options, stablecoins have emerged as a particularly interesting opportunity.
Yardley noted that stablecoin adoption is not yet the primary payment method, but usage has been growing rapidly.
The decision to prioritise stablecoins ultimately came down to two questions: whether they could generate incremental revenue and whether they could improve the company’s economics. The answer, he said, has been yes on both counts.
Why stablecoins could matter for travel
Yardley also sees a particularly strong case for stablecoins in cross-border travel payments. Unlike more volatile cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are designed to minimise price fluctuations, making them more practical for everyday transactions.
That could be particularly relevant in markets where local currencies face instability or where cross-border payments remain expensive or inefficient.
He pointed to Latin America and Africa as examples of regions where stablecoin adoption has developed earlier than in some other markets.
For travel, the appeal is straightforward: flights are inherently cross-border purchases, often involving customers, airlines and payment providers operating in different currencies and jurisdictions.
From flights to a broader platform
Geographically, Laters.com is looking to build on markets where its payment-led proposition is already gaining traction.
The US, Singapore, the UK, Europe and Oceania are among the markets it sees as promising, while Asia-Pacific offers particular potential because of the region’s high adoption of digital wallets.
But the company’s ambitions extend beyond geography. Yardley also said the decision to rebrand from Fly Fairly to Laters.com was also partly driven by ambitions to expand beyond flights and travel.
He said the company has built technology around flight aggregation, payments and payment optimisation. It now believes those capabilities can be applied to other verticals.
Yardley said Laters plans to expand its product and service offerings in the second half of 2026, although he declined to disclose specific details.
The new brand, he said, was designed to encompass those future opportunities. “We needed a brand that was able to encompass all of those things,” he added.
Last Wednesday (Sept 2), Laters.com announced a $1.5 million seed round led by XBO Ventures, the investment arm of XBO.com, the global digital-asset platform, and the completion of its rebrand.
Laters.com launched from Singapore in August 2024 and has been profitable every month since February 2025. Laters.com accepts stablecoins and 70+ other cryptocurrencies.
Yardley founded Laters.com after twenty years in travel and e-commerce: eBay’s EMEA leadership team, Senior Director at Booking Holdings leading partnerships for Agoda and Booking.com across Asia Pacific, and most recently Managing Director at ShopBack, information from the company’s website showed.