Recently, I finally decided to use some of my Bitcoin profit to purchase a 2 night hotel stay at the Hyatt in Waikiki, Oahu for my 30th birthday in January.
I had heard that Expedia took Bitcoin as form of payment and wanted to try it out myself.
I booked my Expedia stay on December 18, 2017 for two nights in January. On that day, Bitcoin was on average trading around 19,000 USD more or less.
Expedia actually doesn't handle or grab your Bitcoins directly, rather they use a third-party handler to do the transaction, and that happens to be Coinbase.
You must have an account with Expedia in order to transact with Bitcoin. When you click on the Bitcoin option, it will lead you to the third party site Coinbase from which Coinbase will display a wallet address with which you send the Bitcoin too. It's also timed-out at 15 minutes, but that's actually plenty of time for one to get their Bitcoin address and send Bitcoin.
Now the biggest thing I was afraid of is when I clicked "Sent" to the wallet address, that the dreadful long wait of my Bitcoins would take forever to get to Coinbase. But to my surprise, the transaction went through within 5 seconds. I'm deducing that Coinbase is taking the payments in one confirmation, so that transactions would happen faster.
For the purchase I made that day, around 0.035 Bitcoin was sent for the amount around 730 USD.
Literally the next day on December 19, 2017 ... the value of Bitcoin went downwards to average of 17,500 USD, and then subsequent days thereafter especially when Bitcoin Cash got listed on Coinbase, the average price Bitcoin has plummeted to around 15,000 USD.
So that 0.035 Bitcoin to Expedia will now only be worth around 525 USD at time of me writing this. So it's best to use your Bitcoin for purchases when Bitcoin is at its peak so that you are only giving away as less amount of Bitcoin as possible.
Of course, Bitcoin still has opportunity to break above 20,000 USD in the future, so it would make the 0.035 Bitcoin hotel stay more expensive, but hey, can't always fret over the day to day price changes.
Hence, it's nice that we all are HODL-ing our cryptos, but at some point in time, it's best that we evaluate "WHY" we are in it. And specifically that we should use portions of it for services, goods, or vacations!
