Northwest Airlines announced today that they will now be accepting PayPal payments for ticket purchases off their website NWA.com. This is a great move on PayPal’s part, especially if Northwest notices an increase in website airline ticket sales. An increase in ticket sales just for taking a step that simple would certainly attract the attention of other competing airlines and could mean more business from those other airlines for PayPal in the future. I would really like to see some numbers, facts and statistics about this so hopefully they release some data about the expansion of their accepted payments.

By using PayPal, NWA.com customers can now pay for tickets online through debit cards, credit cards, direct transfers, stored funds or by using their individual PayPal account to make their ticket purchase.

NWA is not only accepting PayPal as a payment option, but they are also aggressively promoting the new PayPal option to their current and future website customers. Starting today, NWA will award 500 bonus miles for every round-trip ticket purchased through their NWA.com website using the PayPal payment option. This promotion will last through September 30, 2007.

Adding PayPal as a payment option on NWA.com gives customers more flexibility when paying for their next trip, said Al Lenza, vice president distribution & e-commerce at Northwest Airlines. We look forward to serving the millions of PayPal customers who can now make travel reservations at NWA.com using their PayPal accounts.

Stephanie Tilenius, vice president of merchant services for PayPal, said: We are excited to add Northwest Airlines, one of the world’s largest airlines, as the first airline to accept PayPal. Many of our customers already book travel with Northwest Airlines and are eager to use their PayPal accounts to do so.

So what’s next for the major airlines? I would like to see them start adding and accepting Google Checkout as a payment option alongside PayPal just to be fair and to offer consumers as many choices as possible. That might be wishful thinking on my part, but I think there is room for everyone in the payment processing world.

Update: I just heard, from a reliable source, that Southwest Airlines has also now started offering PayPal as a payment method for ticket purchases made on southwest.com or iflyswa.com. Here’s the Southwest announcement if you want to take a look.