Guest Analysis: Bitcoin Takes Flight – Travel Providers Discover the Currency Invites New Travelers on Board

JOHN MCDONNELL

As bitcoin gains traction in the mainstream, it’s been exciting to follow which merchants and businesses are the latest to add the digital currency as a payment option. Multiple diary-like articles have followed the adventures of journalists trying to live their lives for a time by only spending bitcoin. Of course, news about where bitcoin is accepted has practical interest if you hold the currency and can feel the bitcoins burning a hole in your virtual pocket. What can you buy with them? Where can you go? Can bitcoin pay for your vacation?

Like many new technologies that end up playing an everyday role in our lives (think credit cards, iPads, etc.), bitcoin is rapidly advancing along the path from curiosity to novelty to commonplace. News stories following bitcoin’s current rise are a bit like those following which companies had just added a web presence in the 1990s, or which brands had just officially launched a Facebook or Twitter page in the last decade. Any critics should remember that bitcoin is a rambunctious six-year-old, and big for its age; it may not be so long before it develops the ubiquity enjoyed by the likes of its 225-year-old cousin, the U.S. Dollar.

There’s good news for those wishing to turn their digital currency into a real getaway: Bitcoin is poised to make huge strides into the travel industry. Recently UATP (Universal Air Travel Plan, Inc.), the airline-owned payment network accepted by 260+ airlines opened up its network to accepting bitcoin payments (disclosure: our company provides UATP’s bitcoin payment processing). Until now there have been only a few travel outlets serving bitcoin users with somewhere to get to, but those that do exist have reported success, and certainly the options for bitcoin users can be expected to diversify as more booking sites grab their piece of the proverbial (and promising) bitcoin pie.

CheapAir.com has accepted bitcoin for travel bookings since November 2014, and has shared the positive results of its first year. As CEO Jeff Klee reported at the Airline Travel Payment Summit in San Francisco in December 2014, in CheapAir’s first twelve months accepting bitcoin, the site saw $2.3M in bitcoin sales (with total annual online sales of $150M), an average of 1.5% per day in sales with bitcoin. The results showed that 100% of bitcoin users were new customers to the site, displaying the great potential for merchants to access a new untapped market by adding bitcoin as a payment option. CheapAir also found that bitcoin users are high-end customers, with consumers who purchased with bitcoin ten times as likely to buy business or first class tickets as those purchasing with credit cards. For travel providers looking to add a fresh base of high-end users, CheapAir’s experience makes bitcoin acceptance look ready for takeoff.

Bitcoin users are all around the globe, and bitcoin itself is a global currency, not reliant on any government or necessarily restricted by borders. As bitcoin acceptance continues to advance with travel providers, bitcoin users will soon be able to travel as freely as their currency can.