Expedia Has Quietly Removed Bitcoin Payment Option

Major travel booking web site Expedia.com recently stopped receiving Bitcoin (BTC) as a payment option for hotels or flights, Expedia told Cointelegraph june twenty seven.

An Expedia voice confirmed that the service “no longer accepts digital currency Bitcoin,” ranging from Gregorian calendar month ten, 2018, apologizing for “any inconvenience this might cause.” The service didn't discuss the cancellation either on social media or on its web site.

Community members took to Reddit to express their contempt of the recent news, later on suggesting a number of alternatives to Expedia, such as CheapAir travel service, that started accepting Bitcoin for flights and hotel bookings in 2013.

Reddit user bowiestar noted that the bulk of workers in the IT industry tend to urge their salaries partly in crypto, implying that the service would eventually lose a section of its customers.

“Expedia.com, one of the biggest sites to book flights/hotels on used to take Bitcoin for years... I went on there to appear at flights and detected they no longer accept it. client support said they stopped accepting it june 10… a lot of us within the tech industry get a portion of our salary in Bitcoin and it was really good to use Expedia for flights. I won’t be using them anymore!”

As Cointelegraph reported  earlier this year, the intense volatility of the crypto markets apparently doesn't scare industry insiders from participating of their pay in crypto, with some even preferring to induce their salaries entirely in Bitcoin.

Expedia first declared it would accept Bitcoin as a style of payment in june, 2014, once it teamed up with leading crypto exchange Coinbase. Some community members suggested that they cancelled accepting Bitcoin due to Coinbase’s call to suspend custodial solutions for merchants, that apparently would result in creating Bitcoin payments harder. Expedia’s aforementioned rival CheapAir switched to BitPay from Coinbase for this very reason.

In an open letter to customers seeking input on potential merchandiser solutions, CheapAir CEO Jeff klee wrote that the company required a “reliable processing partner” so as to accept payments in Bitcoin cash (BCH), Dash, and Litecoin (LTC), additionally to Bitcoin.