Expedia, the online travel website company, announced Wednesday in a news release that it will be expanding its payment options for customers. This means that users who wish to book a hotel room for their next vacation or business trip can do so using bitcoins. Expedia will become the very first major travel agency to offer the virtual currency.
Expedia partnered with Coinbase to process the bitcoin payments. Also, the company confirmed that it won’t be hoarding the bitcoins. Instead, Expedia will have Coinbase transfer bitcoins daily into United States dollars. Michael Gulmann, Expedia’s vice president of global product, said the decision is neither for nor against bitcoin.
The website noted that it will start with hotels in order to test the bitcoin process. If the bitcoin integration proves to be a success then it will allocate the digital currency to its other service lines, too. This is believed to be just another step to fully legitimize the peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency.
“Expedia, Inc. is in a unique position, as one of the world’s leading online travel agencies, to solve travel planning and booking for our customers and partners alike by adopting the latest payment technologies,” said Gulmann in a statement. “We’re continually looking at ways consumers want to pay for their travel; bitcoin is a great example of how Expedia is investing early in an array of payment options to give our customers and partners more choice in the ways they interact with us.”
Other travel-related firms have started to accept bitcoins as of late: smaller individual travel agencies; 9Flats, an online apartment rental outlet; and CheapAir.com. However, none of the aforementioned has as much name recognition and awareness as Expedia. It also joins the likes of Overstock.com, the Dish Network and Bloomberg News in terms of accepting bitcoins.
Expedia did concede that it doesn’t expect to generate big business with bitcoins, but it is internally optimistic that the virtual currency will remain an integral part of the Expedia business model moving forward.
