Jetstar have a $8.50 minimum credit card booking fee for paying using a credit card. As you can guess, I love paying for things by credit card and earning points, but I don’t love paying nearly an extra 10% on a $90 airfare to do so.
It turns out that you can pay for your Jetstar flight using Jetstar gift vouchers, which are available in increments including $100, $200, $300 and $500. Gift vouchers have to be purchased using Paypal, with I assume some kind of exclusive commercial deal between Paypal and Jetstar for this – but there’s no fee for purchasing vouchers, and you can then apply one to your online booking.
The method is pretty simple – only one Jetstar voucher can be applied per booking, so you’ll need to choose the closest voucher value under the flight cost you are purchasing.
You’ll then have to pay the difference using an option which doesn’t incur a fee – either POLI or Jetstar Mastercard. You can only use a voucher for one booking, so any overage can’t be applied to another booking, it will be lost, hence the need for a copay.
Choose a single voucher value from those above
Send the voucher to yourself by email – it will show up within a few minutes
Payment takes place over at Paypal…
…but it won’t let you use an American Express, unfortunately
Once you have the voucher – it will show up as a PDF including a long numeric code to input during the flight payment process – you can then go about making your flight booking.
When you get to the checkout screen, you can apply your voucher number and the available payment options to then pay the reminder of the cost change to look like the below.
At this point, I then pay by POLI straight out of my bank account for the overage. I made 3 bookings on Jetstar yesterday, one for $120, one for $220, and one for $480. The last one was the ‘worst’ to use with this technique, as it meant buying a $300 voucher and paying the $180 copay from my bank account.
That’s still better than shelling out $8.50 on Jetstar’s credit card booking fee just for the privilege of paying by credit card. The whole process took probably about 5 minutes longer than just making the booking directly and paying the fee, so time well spent.
“Please note that if you are using the Jetstar Mobile site you can avoid the Booking and Service fee by paying with a debit MasterCard, Jetstar Voucher or a Jetstar MasterCard.”
This could save some more time. The thing is though Debit Mastercards are rare 🙂 I know of ME Bank and CBA offering them but none of the other majors.
If you still wanted to earn cc rewards points and avoid the Jetstar service charge (without having to buy a single use Jetstar gift voucher and have to split payment you could purchase a prepaid debit Mastercard and use it on Jetstar’s mobile site.
Thanks
preference and how you value points and status credits – not easy to generalise.