Travel giant, Flight Centre Group, has signalled a move towards company-wide acceptance of Bitcoin might not be far away after one of its biggest subsidiaries adopted the cryptocurrency as a method of payment.

The subsidiary, UK-based Corporate Traveller, announced yesterday it would begin accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash following increasing demand from clients.

Corporate Traveller is the UK’s largest provider of business travel services with offices in 20 locations across the nation.

“We identified an increasing demand from our clients for the option to pay in Bitcoin for business travel bookings made by our travel consultants,” said Corporate Traveller UK General Manager, Andy Hegley.

The company has partnered with BitPay to process the cryptocurrency payments which will be transferred to GBP and settled within two business days.

“We chose BitPay to manage our merchant processing because they make it easy and handle the entire process of getting the Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash from the customer and depositing cash into our account,” said Hegley.

“The blockchain industry is growing exponentially and we are excited to be able to offer our clients the ability to pay in bitcoin, whilst having the reassurance of our settlement from BitPay being in pounds sterling.

“We believe Corporate Traveller is the first business travel management company to offer this payment option to SMEs in the UK.”

A sign of things to come at Flight Centre?

Flight Centre has given no official indication that it is exploring options to accept Bitcoin at its 1,239 high-profile retail travel agencies across the globe, but a confidential source within the company says executives are taking note of an increasing demand from clients for cryptocurrency payments.

“All the time people ask if we accept Bitcoin… Mainly international students and tourist already here trying to book more flights,” an employee at an Australian fight centre travel agency told Micky.

“Management knows about it, they’ll probably see how it (Bitcoin payments) goes at Corporate Traveller, before they let our customers pay with Bitcoin.”

The tourism sector has been one of the biggest adopters of cryptocurrencies.

Binance recently invested almost $3m into Australian cryptocurrency payments processor TravelbyBit as it rolls out crypto point-of-sale systems at airports across the globe.

Blockchain-based bookings website, Travala raised $US2.6m through and initial coin offering in April last year and now accepts payments in 10 different cryptocurrencies for bookings at more than 500,000 hotels globally.

RELATED: Cash-for-Bitcoin service rolled out at 1,400 retail outlets across Australia.