An American Travel company, Expedia.com is no longer accepting Bitcoin as the payment. The walk out of Bitcoin payment by Expedia wasn’t the prior notification to users. The Terms and Conditions page shows “Bitcoin payment availability still”.

Expedia.com had been supporting Bitcoin payments since 2014 but the removal of it spread when a post appeared on a Reddit. According to a Reddit user:

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 10th. that sucks! 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 wont be using them anymore!

On questioning, the official representative of Expedia.com confirmed Bitcoin is no longer a payment. Christie Hudson, Sr. Communications Manager at Expedia – North America, explained;

I can confirm that as of May 10, 2018, Expedia no longer supports Bitcoin as a payment method. Currently, we do not feel that we are able to offer the best experience for those using Bitcoin. But will continue to evaluate various options in order to offer travelers flexible payment solutions.

The Crypto community suggested the possible reason for Expedia removing Bitcoin payment was due to Coinbase stopping custodial merchant tools. However, the reason behind the discontinuance isn’t officially revealed yet.

Possible Potentials to its Competitors

So for now, there are many other travel companies accepting virtual payments, few of those are Destinia.com, CheapAir.com, Abitsky.com etc. Nonetheless, the redditors notice strong potential for CheapAir which supports four major cryptocurrenices. Untill Coinbase sustain Merchant tools, CheapAir’s Bitcoin payment processor was available through Coinbase. However, at present CheapAir accept Bitcoin using BitPay Payment Processor and the other cryptocurrencies, LTC, BCH, DASH are processed by Gocoin Exchange.