Since May 10, the travel agency Expedia has suspended its payment system for airline tickets and hotels with bitcoin.
This decision of the company was confirmed to CriptoNoticias, through email, by the Communications Manager of Expedia, Christie Hudson, but did not mention the reasons why this measure was taken, which has not been officially notified to the public by the company on your website or on your social networks.
The information has transcended among the users of the agency through comments on social networks, being discussed on June 27 at a forum of the bitcoiner community in Reddit, where several people talked about their experiences with the company and pointed out that they were not accepting the cryptocurrency.
A review of the website of the agency allows you to verify the fact, because when trying to make a flight and hotel reservation, the platform does not offer the option of payment with cryptocurrency, in addition to the traditional forms of payment. Despite this, in the help section of the website it is still indicated that they accept "credit or debit card, China UnionPay, PayPal or Bitcoin", with a link that leads to a specific page that exposes the particular terms and conditions of use for purchases with the virtual currency.
Notably, Expedia, one of the most popular travel agencies in the world, which is part of the Expedia Group, Inc. corporation and has offices in more than 30 countries, began accepting bitcoins in 2014, becoming one of the companies in the world. pioneer tourism sector in using this payment method.
However, from that date until the present the option has been offered intermittently, being interrupted temporarily in March 2017. By that time, it was pointed out that everything was due to a bad experience lived with payments in bitcoins in Europe Eastern, because of the volatility of cryptocurrency. Hence, a subsequent requirement derives from the clients, who had to complete the transaction in a maximum of 10 minutes, by virtue of the variations in the exchange rate.
POSSIBLE PROBLEMS WITH PAYMENT PLATFORM
Due to misinformation about the causes of the suspension of the cryptocurrency payment service on Expedia, many of the users debate on social networks. A user of Reddit comments that the decision of the agency could be linked to Coinbase "commercial custody tools", although this has not been confirmed by either of the two companies.
In that sense, it is recalled that last April the exchange house Coinbase modified its payment service and suspended its custody functions, affecting several merchants that used its system, among which was another travel agency, CheapAir.
In the case of CheapAir, once Coinbase's news of suspending its custody services came out, last May the CEO of the company, Jeff Klee, communicated with users through his corporate blog explaining the problem and posing as an alternative the use of the BIP70 protocol with BitPay. It also incorporated support for the payment with Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Dash altcoins. Currently the agency is still using the Coinbase platform temporarily for bitcoin payments, while looking for new options for customers who do not have BIP70 wallets.
Users of the Expedia service also expressed concern about the suspension, considering that many of them receive payment of their salaries in cryptocurrencies and are willing to pay the reservations of tickets with cryptocurrency. For those cases, it is worth mentioning that it is possible to use crypto currencies to buy airline tickets at other agencies such as CheapAir, Destinia, Travelforcoin, BTCtrip and ABitSky.