PayPal is partnering with hotel payment provider Selfbook to let users search for and book hotels within the PayPal app. The company said that it will let users pay through PayPal at checkout and offer exclusive discounts to users within the app. Users can also use PayPal Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) for select hotels that have enabled the feature. People using the PayPal app will be able to go to the Offers section and search for hotels with filters like travel dates and number of guests. Users will see hotels that use Selfbook’s payment suite on these apps, but it is not clear if Selfbook is making its entire catalog available to PayPal users.
For PayPal, this is a move to upsell another offering to users within the app. The company said that with its payment products, it has observed an 84% uptick among people who pay online for travel.
PayPal also said that Selfbook will also soon integrate the payment checkout products within its workflow outside the app. What’s more, Selfbook will use PayPal’s enterprise payment suite to power credit card payments for its hotels. Selfbook is also using PayPal as a payments partner within Perplexity, which unveiled a feature that lets users discover and book hotels within the chat in March.
“Paying for a hotel has traditionally been the most fragmented part of travel—search one place, book another, pay somewhere else,” Khalid Meniri, Selfbook’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch over email. “With PayPal, we’re collapsing all of that into a single flow embedded directly into AI-powered experiences like Perplexity. It’s not just more convenient for travelers, it gives hotels a direct line to their guests, better margins through no commission, and more control over their brand,” Meniri said.