This Week @ PacSet: Pawprint News & More Q&A!
This week: we’ve got a confirmed trip to announce, and Evan discusses the big payment plan dilemma.
Pawprint Pathways confirmed to depart!
If you (or someone you know) has been waiting for an excuse to see half of Japan, engage with some very furry/friendly locals, and have an absolutely amazing time, we have some fabulous news for you: Pawprint Pathways is confirmed to depart!
Click the image/signup button below (on mobile) or to the right (on PC) to join the fun! The elevator pitch: you’ll go all the way from Hiroshima to Tokyo, hitting Kyoto, Osaka, Matsumoto, Yudanaka Onsen and Sendai along the way.
We’ll also be visiting bunnies, monkeys, cats, deer, pigeons (no, really), and everything in between. Oh, and humans. Very, very awesome humans.
It’s one heck of a trip – all killer, no filler, and two free days in Kansai (the Osaka/Kyoto region) and Tokyo respectively.
Read more about the journey here. Got questions? Reach out and we’ll answer them as best we can! We’ll see you this fall!
September 25/26* - October 10, 2026
HIROSHIMA • OKUNOSHIMA • OSAKA • KYOTO • MATSUMOTO • YUDANAKA ONSEN • SENDAI • ISHINOMAKI • TASHIROJIMA • TOKYO
🐰 Unique encounters with Japan's friendly animal residents
🐒 Visit the famous “monkey onsen” where Japanese macques bathe
⛵ Experience one of Japan's "best 3" views in Matsushima
🏙️ Hiroshima to Tokyo, hitting all the best spots
$4,695
Q&A Part 3: Payment plans
Hello everyone! Evan here, once again here to go over some of the feedback we got from all of you lovely people on the survey that wrapped about a week ago.
While we got a lot of questions/suggestions from all of you, there was one item of feedback that came up again and again, regardless of who was responding. Some of you have probably been wondering when we’d get around to it in this space.
Yes friends: it’s time to talk about the service that PacSet is fighting tooth and nail to bring back to life.
WILL PAYMENT PLANS EVER COME BACK?
Your feedback said it all, friends:
I don't know if it's possible but the payment plan was amazing and made the trip more feasible.
I ended up choosing PacSet (and I believe is your biggest selling point even relevant today if it still stands) was the fact I could pay the whole trip on installments. I could feasibly budget out a chuck of $$ monthly plus set extra aside for stupid stuff I would buy in Japan. And that was a deal breaker.
offer buy now/pay later options like Affirm. Personally, I would never advocate for such services. But if cost is the prohibitive reason to not travel, setting up a forced payment plan could help so Pacset gets paid up front.
Travel is just so costly now, even to travel inside the US. Maybe investigate adding payment options like Klarna or Upstart.
So: will our payment plan come back? Here’s the short answer: I HOPE SO.
When we had to shut payment plans down, close to HALF of our guests were using them to pay for their trips. I knew that getting rid of them would affect us, and I can say without a doubt that if there was a way we could have kept them at the time, we would have. Trust me, none of us at PacSet chose to get rid of what was obviously one of our best services. We were forced to.
I really cannot possibly understate how much we want to bring payment plans back to PacSet, and I have discussed the matter with our bank and our new payment processor. I can say that I am personally seeking counsel from a lawyer on how to bring them back and avoid the absolute disaster that happened to us (and other small travel companies) after COVID. Progress is being made, but it’s a slog.
As some of you may have noticed, the whole “credit card companies trying to pressure merchants” thing has been in the news a lot lately, mainly in terms of censorship. And for those of you who have followed my personal social media screeds noticed, this has actually been a problem for a long, long time. Payment processors have a ridiculous amount of power in the USA; they can just stop giving funds that customers have legally paid to a business, for any reason, and hold funds for 90 days.
I never thought that PacSet was at risk of that happening to us; we’ve never had a credit card chargeback request in our entire 15 year history, and we are personally required to verify the information about every traveler that travels with us. And yet, it did happen to us post-COVID, and for that reason, when we got a new processor, we suspended the plans as a precautionary measure to lessen the pressure.
Not surprisingly, since then, we’ve had no issues – which fits, because we never had them before all of that happened either. What is going to have to happen in bringing the monthly payment plan back is going to have to be a lot of meetings, a lot of planning, and a lot of guarantees. We love having a payment plan, don’t get me wrong, but I can say that if we are suddenly disallowed from taking any credit cards again from anyone… that’s game over. That means we can’t accept money from anyone.
We did look into using checks in the immediate post-COVID era and looked at it as a method to restart monthlies, but as some of you know, there were numerous issues with that approach and the whole thing incurred a lot of drama, so I personally decided to push that idea off a bridge into a tub of angry sharks. Nom nom nom. The sharks ate it, it is gone.
On the bright side: PacSet has done absolutely everything it has needed to do to make this whole thing run well again, and since we’ve built up four years of excellent credit, I am sure we’re closer than we’ve ever been. If all goes well, I am certain we’ll have some good news to announce soon.
In the meantime, please do consider joining us and paying the old-fashioned way if you have the means. I promise that the trips are just as awesome with a $300 deposit and the balance due later. ;)
Next time, we’ll pick a fluffier topic to discuss. Promise!
-E
