Bitcoin Forum

Hi, my name is Kim Koldtoft, and I work as CTO for a Danish start-up.

We have built a hotel booking website (and later we will add plane tickets and car rentals).
We are backed by strong investors and have great ambitions.  We have all the same hotels as our competitors, at the same prices.

Business model
Our business model is, that we don't spend money on traditional advertisement and marketing, but instead we donate half of our commission to charity, every time a hotel booking is placed. We then use our NGO partnerships to help spread awareness of our movement. Our NGO partners are motivated to help spread awareness, by telling their millions of followers about us, as they will be receiving the donations when they book their hotels.

Our hotel booking website
https://www.goodwings.com/en-us (https://www.goodwings.com/en-us)

https://i.imgur.com/5hjGSon.jpg

A quick introduction video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBL1KWtmOkY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBL1KWtmOkY)

How Bitcoin fits in
I am a big advocate for bitcoin, and have been using bitcoin myself, for a little over 3 years. I would love to make Goodwings the first "main-stream" hotel booking engine, that accepts bitcoin. I have done some research, and been unable to find any large scale hotel booking website that accepts crypto currency. Expedia has a Bitcoin Terms & Conditions page, but then when placing a booking, I can't pay with bitcoin.

We are preparing to add various payment methods such as PayPal, Apple Wallet, Android Pay, Google wallet etc. I would love to add Bitcoin to that list, but as I am sure you can imagine, I expect my colleagues to have the typical (and very annoying) "Is bitcoin not illegal and used for drugs and guns?"

I can explain to my colleagues how that it's not true, but they only have to point out that I can't explain it to all our our potential customers, and thus we should not add bitcoin, as it may be perceived poorly.

However, if I could counter that, with a promise (however vague) of a new potential client-base, as there might be lots of good bitcoin people, that would love to help make a positive change in the world, at no extra cost.


If anyone has any input on how accepting bitcoin could help attract additional business, as well as any other input, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much,

- Kim Koldtoft

Well, Bitcoin really isn't illegal.. It's a form of money and for most people who don't really give much of a crap to analyse it that way:
a way to process payments.. It should even be more beneficial to accept more ways, especially since you could easily do that and eliminate the middle man
and get more money in the process.

Good luck, I'm following your developments!

Do you have open API?

Do you have plane tickets? Are you planning to add it?

Thank you.

Yes. I know it's not illegal and so does my colleagues. My concern is not with the law, but with the perception of bitcoin. To go one step further. My real concern is with my colleges and our investors perception of peoples perception of bitcoin. I don't think there is any risk here. I don't believe that anyone will decide not to book their hotel, because they see Bitcoin as one of the payment options in the checkout flow.

But I love your argument of being able to donate more to charity, because of lover transaction costs. Much appreciated.


No we don't have an open API yet. We are currently running off a single provider right now, but once we add more providers, we plan on building an API.

We also don't have plane tickets yet, but plan on adding that. (the problem is that there is no profits in plane tickets.. you have to add fee's and do up-sales and one of our core principles, is to make a clean, respectful and all around awesome booking experience.

The site looks fantastic, i noticed that the bottom is missing bitcoin logo from the payment options.
Also when i did search it gives title as "søg på hoteller" which i think is a bug.

Good luck to you and your business! :)

Isn't other payment options (like cash to be exact), also used for those? BTCitcoin is another form of payment and it could be used in many ways, same goes for cash.

The whole idea of accepting BTCitcoin is something that many tend to miss (it will always be a plus). Imagine a tourist that stands in front of a hotel that they want to book, without any cash but has enough BTCitcoin on tip of their fingers (figure of speech), they will be able to book a room right away using your website (without the need for worrying if they have enough balance on their credit cards or enough cash of the country their at). That's one scenario and this discussion shouldn't even be here, since accepting BTCitcoin should be considered as a priority (not an issue).

Expedia already accepts bitcoin right?

Airbnb I am sure is close behind..

In my opinion, you should definitely add bitcoin as one of the payment methods. First of all bitcoin is not illegal. Yeah some are using bitcoins for illegal purpose. But it doesnt mean that whole bitcoin users use bitcoin for illegal purpose. Many people are using fiat currency for illegal purpose , but it doesnt mean all fiat users use it for illegal purpose. For hotel business adding bitcoin as one of the payment ,will  boost your hotel's reputation among visitors and it will increase your customers .

I can't see that they do.. Maybe it's only for some hotels or something. I could find a terms and conditions page for bitcoin payment. But when booking a hotel, I don't see any bitcoin payment option.

Tell them,before bitcoins came into existence,people still bought guns and drugs off the internet using other forum of money.Bitcoins just made it simple.

Let the customers pay using the normal payment methods.Keep Bitcoins as an option.If someone who understands bitcoins as much as you do,they'll be glad to book stuff from your site using bitcoins.And they will definitely pass the word around.

Exactly! In terms of coding and maintenance,bitcoins needs the least attention.


Bitcoin is just another way of accepting payments.It wouldn't grow your customer base as such but keep the potential customers hooked on to the site.A bitcoiner will always book a hotel from your site with his bitcoins if he knows you're the only company doing it.By doing so,you'd not only expand your tech but also give a good name to the bitcoin world.

how are you gonna handle cancelations? sounds pretty problematic to me

Doesn't sound so problematic.They can just send the bitcoins back to the same address where they came from ?Infact,this seems like a much better option than sending the money back to other digital wallets or bank accounts.Bitcoin wins over everything.

Great that is so cool. I am expecting more and more business entities doing this especially in my country and its neighbors.

Bitcoin transaction is much cheaper and once your customers find it out (if they haven't used bitcoin before) they will surely love your service for they can save a lot.
Sooner or later more business will have to add bitcoin to accept for payment so why not be the first one.

My plan (for now) is to handle any bitcoin transaction as a EUR transaction, exchanging the funds instantly. So you can't be guaranteed to be refunded in bitcoin, but may have to accept a refund in fiat currency in case of a refund. We have to pay the hotel provider right away, in Euro, so holding on to bitcoin, would be a bit of a risk for us, do to it's volatility.

Also about half of hotel bookings are made at non refundable hotels, so for those, this would not be a problem.

very very nice! i hope your sucessful  ;D

Good Luck, that looks very nice and clean  ;)

It's a good way to charity and attract more impression.
By the way, how about tour packages? I built a travel agency in Indonesia, so maybe  I can add or you can list it in your service like competitors do.

Hope booking.com will accept btc in future.

Sorry, but I don't mix business with charitable activities. I usually spend 100 nights a year in hotels, paying for about half of it (companies I'm working with are paying the other half), and the most important thing is price. The hotel's price (service commission included) shall be as low as possible. I suppose you charge high commissions to give away one half, that's enough to make me want to look elsewhere.

Who is your api provider?

Actually, booking an hotel with BTC is a great idea, but most travelers are looking for deals, so giving money to a charity isn't in the plan. You have to compete on price.

No.. We have the same prices as our competitors.  You can try and compare our prices with hotels.com and they will be exactly the same. So if you use Goodwings.com and have about 100 stays pr. year, you would be able to donate a pretty decent amount of money to charity. Or you can keep using our competitors, and let that money go to Google, which is where most of their advertising money goes. (and that is the money we send to charity).

We are building our own API, but we are using EANøs API (Expedia Affiliate Network) for providing hotels.

Yes. We know and we are certainly experiencing that. But all hotel booking websites, have more or less the same prices, as they all use the same 3 or 4 providers.

In modern generation the easiest way in making plan for you to relax, enjoy and amaze or planning out of town like book to have an outing, bonding with friends and etc. Through online is one of the simple and less hazzle way. So you use BTC to paid it through hotel online booking in hotel as long as it is online offering hotels or hotel in online service.

As bitcoin continues to spread it wings, multiple industries are starting to accept it as a payment option. Here’s a list of hotels and booking sites that accept the digital currency.
1. Expedia.
2. Holiday Inn hotel in brooklyn, newyork.
3. One shot hotels.
4. Destinia.
5. Hotelgo 24.

hoping to see it also on booking.com one day

You can just use some more payment processors - more exactly find one that also accepts Bitcoin.
Like any business that pays his taxes, your business needs your local currency, clearly. Getting Bitcoin directly would add more unnecessary paperwork, I guess.
If you get a payment processor that accepts Bitcoin among other currencies and payment methods, your business CAN get some more customers because of the "new payment method", although for the company itself everything will go in the same way as it did until now. You'll have much less to explain.

I totally get your mindset, as it's the same as mine. But our concept is aimed exactly at that kind of consumer.

1) We have exactly the same prices as our competitors, as we use the same provider (Expedia). We are not allowed to charge lower (or higher) rates than what they give us. Those are also the same rates you will find on hotels.com. So it's literally the same hotels and the same prices. That is made possible, by not spending money on traditional advertisement, but instead giving that money to charity.

2) As for not mixing business and charity. It's not really charity, since it's not costing your business (aka yours customers, investors, stakeholders etc.) anything. But instead they get something extra, which is CRS (https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Social_Responsibility) value (Corporate Social Responsibility). You will get an impact report such as this (https://content.sandbox.goodwings.com/wp-content/uploads/Impact-report-example-en.pdf) that you can then include in your annual reports.

I hope all that, made some kind of sense :)

Why wouldn't you just turn some of your Bitcoin into Cash and then use the cash on the hotel booking site that you like?

Good news for Bitcoin users. Hopefully more and more tourist attractions are receiving bitcoin.
Very sorry in my country nothing like this. Hopefully next year there is at least a restaurant that receives payment with bitcoin.

I think is a great idea. One of the great thing of Crypto is that it is Borderless. You could take your BTC anywhere without worrying in going to a local exchange everytime. Now you can take BTC and search for localbitcoins everytime  ;D

Its not the only hoteling site accepting BTC there are many more projects like this.Not a unique idea

May i ask if booking.com started to accept bitcoin?

Nice startup project, nice to some more and more products and website's make a bitcoin option.
Or as we see now, a complete Bitcoin based hotel booking site.
Feel free to think about a bigger project where people can buy more ( up selling ) such as, car rents on holiday , but plan tickets as well.

Will this privilege be only for Danish citizens or do you plan to widen the area of users?

I think this is a great idea, I woulld absolutely stay at a hotel where bitcoin is accepted. I'd be even more inclined to stay if btc was accepted. Although this platform is great, maybe you could have an entire page explaining how btc works/what it is for beginners and people new to the bitcoin world.

Looks Bert Nice! Good luck with your project.

There are more and more sites that accept bitcoin as a payment method
it's a very good sign

now this would a great idea, but if you think about it, it wont be much difference in process just more secured with Bitcoin

This is a very good idea but the price value for your rooms would have to be reviewed every hour to correspond with volatile bitcoin prices