Emniyet Taksi in the resort city of Marmaris, Turkey, started accepting payment in the cryptocurrency. A local entrepreneur works hard to make bitcoin option available also in local hotels and travel agencies.

Marmaris is one of the largest tourist centres in Turkey. A Mediterranean resort located on the Turquois coast, it has a permanent population of 30,000 which increases to about 400,000 during the tourist season. From now on, city visitors will not need Turkish Liras to pay their taxi driver, says BitcoinHaber. Thanks to the effort of a tourist entrepreneur Kürşat Öncül, local company Emniyet Taksi (meaning “safe taxi” in Turkish) now accepts bitcoin payments. Öncül says he dreams of making Marmaris a ‘bitcoin paradise’ with more services and local businesses to add the cryptocurrency to their payment options.

Another taxi company that went bitcoin in February is Budapest Taxi, operating 580 cabs in the capital of Hungary. While doubting that bitcoin option is going to be in high demand among customers Csaba Horváth, the managing director of the company, remarked:

“We believe that we have to grab every opportunity that comes along, to take advantage of any innovation, and if one of those becomes very successful, we can say we were the first to use it.”

In January, Neal Belcher, a bitcoin-accepting London taxi driver, shared with CoinFox his belief that in the near future all taxi drivers will start accepting cryptocurrencies.

Alexey Tereshchenko