Major hotel and flight booking website Expedia recently started accepting digital currency Bitcoin (BTC) as a mode of payment for booking flights and hotels.
An Expedia spokesperson confirmed that these services are no longer available on Expedia and now Expedia no longer accepts cryptocurrency Bitcoin for booking hotels and flights starting from June 10, 2018, and apologized for any inconvenience this may cause to its users. This canceled payment method was neither mentioned on Expedia website nor on social media.
Community members started expressing their disappointment on Reddit for the recent news, subsequently community members started suggesting a number of alternatives to Expedia, such as CheapAir travel service, which started accepting Bitcoin for booking flights and hotel in 2013.
A Reddit user mentioned that most of the members of the IT industry get their salary partly in Bitcoin and because of this Expedia would lose part of its customers.
That user also stated that “Expedia.com, one of the largest sites to book flights/hotels on used to take Bitcoin for years... I went on there to look at flights and noticed they no longer accept it. Customer support said they stopped accepting it June 10… A lot of us in 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!”
Expedia announced the acceptance of Bitcoin as a mode of payment in June 2014, when it collaborated with leading crypto exchange Coinbase. Some community members stated that Expedia has canceled accepting Bitcoin due to Coinbase's decision to suspend custodial solutions for merchants, which ostensibly would lead to making Bitcoin payments more difficult. Expedia’s competitor CheapAir switched to BitPay from Coinbase for this very reason.