Bitcoin Forum

Is it worthed to Shop online with crypto instead of Fiat Currrency?

For example:  booking hotel or flight with crypto?

You may find these links useful if you wanna book hotel or airline.

 The first luxury hotel to accept cryptocurrencies  (https://partner.booking.com/en-gb/click-magazine/first-luxury-hotel-accept-cryptocurrencies)

There is XcelPay app (https://medium.com/@xcelpay2018/airlines-that-accept-bitcoin-payments-5c617775e586) thats lets you pay in crypto to airlines that accept crypto.

I did Not asking the link !!
I was asking is it worthed to use crypto?  Do I Get cheaper?

Yes of course buying or using our bitcoin to book flight is good because we don't need to convert our fiat money to bitcoin and i think there's some privalage if we use bitcoins to pay our booking maybe discount .

Absolutely, big incentives in fact, you can get large discounts just for paying with Bitcoin. Most items on Amazon get 5-33% discounts when you shop through purse.io (http://purse.io).  I've used them many times and saved a lot of money! I prefer Amazon and purse for most things online now.

Sure. It is one of the goals why we have crypto coins, right? With crypto coins, we can directly buy without the need for third parties. It must be a more effective, cheaper cost, and faster transaction. Fiat isn't a good payment tool for online shop, it needs to transfer between one bank to another bank. This makes the transaction more complicated.

If you already have crypto, and you want to book a flight or hotel with fiat, you first need to use an exchange to convert from crypto to fiat. Then you can spend the fiat. Doing this will require that you pay an exchange fee.

If you just book with crypto, then you can skip the exchange fee.

Therefore, yes, since you skip the exchange fee, it is overall cheaper.

It would be worth it if they would give us some cash back for using crypto rather than Fiat,
But if they wouldn't then why would you even use it since most of us just want to gain profit rather than using it as a currency to pay for anything we see's it as an investment tool.

Unless there's an special discount for using crypto (or you have a big stash of crypto that you're willing to use to pay for stuff) then no, there's no point in paying those services with crypto. Why spend it now when you can hodl it and expect bigger gains in the long-term?

I used crypto to buy things in past but not anymore. Every crypto I buy now are intended to be traded to make a profit or hold till I get a good profit. I'd rather buy anything with fiat than to convert it into crypto and buy saving the conversion fees. I have in past lost a great value using crypto when it's prices were low.

I didn't heard any stores, shopes, hotels, restaurant or even an airport here in my country in which you can pay bitcoins or altcoins as a mode of payment but I guess if this scenario will happen, like what you have said it is more convenient and easy to use your bitcoins or even altcoins as a mode of payment because you dont have to waste every single time to convert it into fiat. I hope that this will be possible soon for me to be able to use my bitcoins without taking time to convert it into fiat and pay my bills and other financial related agendas.

But is that Much better deal that I can use crypto to pay for things but I Can profit out of this by dealing with other people who dont have access or knowhow about crypto?

In my experience for travel and hotels you wind up being charged much, much more in many cases. The sites that do it often don't list the cheap airlines. When they do they stick a premium on top.

Elsewhere things are usually the same price unless you mess with people trying to get rid of gift cards.

Not many businesses will have the margins to offer discounts and there's not a great deal in it for them to do so.

Who says it's not worth it? the development of crypto is still in increasing adoption so it's still very worth it in my opinion. Even many services and travel that accept hotel reservations, aircraft and other payments with crypto. You can find those sites on Google, crypto is still in the stage of increasing adoption but surely after adoption is successful then you will find more crypto payments. Check out here http://travelwith2ofus.com/11-travel-sites-that-accept-bitcoin-for-flight-and-hotel-bookings.php

I know there are several online stores and services that offer discounts when you buy with bitcoins. I salute this incentive as it will only boost the adoption of cryptocurrencies.
Also AFAIK you can get amazon gift cards with over 10% discounts with BTC from purse io.

If you're planning to make $10k worth of shopping on Amazon that would save you a good $1k - in my opinion that's well worth the time.

I never buys ticket flight, booking hotel.. in other case I felt comfortable with paying my bill, pay the services and bought some goods. Crypto helpful in my daily.. so if in case buying online with crypto is worthy.

I don't buy those services with crypto simply because I don't know if there's any travel service accepting crypto and my local service probably will offer better rates. If both conditions are met then I would happily spend my crypto. I used my crypto for other things though, mainly for buying digital goods that don't accept any of my local payment system like gift cards, subscription, etc.

I often use Bitcoin to buy digital services (hosting, domain, server, ...) and it is very convenient for me because i don't have to exchange my money, just use Bitcoin for everythings.

I haven't tried buying online using crypto as a mode of payment as in our country only few merchants accept Bitcoin so far. What I am sure is if a merchant is using BTC as payment most probably there would be promos you can avail if you use BTC. In that case, it is more favorable to you as you'll get discounts or probably cashback in using BTC as payment as compare to using fiat or cash payment.

maybe some countries have accepted crypto as a payment method to shop online, or order online for other purposes such as booking hotels and the like as op said. if this is the case, of course crypto is appropriate to be used as a payment method because it has a very valuable value like the fiat we use

Yep, especially if you earn those crypto from your online services/work then spending it through online shopping with gadgets, rtw, collectibles, online games and voucher is really worth it.

Though never used it on hotels since I don't travel often.

I think it’s depends on which crypto do you use.
And sometimes merchants has payment gateway with bad exchange rate.
Example: you buy something for $10 with bitcoin. Actual bitcoin price at this moment is $10,000. But, the merchants has different bitcoin exchange rate. Usually lower than the actual rate. So you will need to pay more in btc. Also dont forget with the transaction fee.

We keep complaining about services not accepting bitcoin but at the same time, we're not willing to use it. We shouldn't expect any service to starting accepting it if all we do is hodl.


Even if they don't accept BTC directly, you could use third party services[1][2][3][4].

[1] https://travelbybit.com/
[2] https://www.travala.com/
[3] bitrefill.com (To buy HotelsGifts or FlightsGifts GCs)
[4] https://www.cheapflights.com

Go with Fiat if you do like to save crypto for future profits but if not then you can use it as you like yet there were merchants that do accept crypto when it comes to booking hotel or flight.
You can check this out https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3078815.0

In my opinion, cryptocurrency or bitcoin was not yet ready for this, most of the time using cryptocurrency was not worth it in this kind of transaction it might be even faster but I think cryptocurrency or bitcoin was not yet really implemented in this kind of transactions and I think these days cryptocurrency was not yet meant as a currency.

I think it is better just to use fiat currency in this simple transaction for me bitcoin is a more on a investment thing if you keep on using bitcoin in this kind in my experience most of the time you are just losing a profit form bitcoin so it is better if you just invest it also there are only limited booking of hotels and flights that are going to accept this cryptocurrency or bitcoin as a payment so surely you will not be able to use it all the time.
The high price in the market could be the thing and the volatility of the bitcoin market price is a big factor why it is not worth using bitcoin most of the time it is better to hold bitcoin  :).

Just my opinion  ;D

cryptocurrency works like fiat, basically its suppose to work as currency that we can use to buy products including on ecommerce sites, booking hotel or flight with crypto if possible. the only airlines being known to public that accepts BTC was a German airline.


a lot of us tend to see BTC as investment. i wouldn't be spending it to shop unless i have no other option that a merchant only accepts BTC.

For now, i dont think crypto is good for online payments. I think crypto may not sercue enough and not been accept by governments so most online service still dont want to add crypto as payment method. And one more reason that crypto need to solve, that is the price changing to quickly in short time, this may be a weak point when using crypto to pay something.

Personally, my country hasn't the strength to operate online payment for Bitcoin, rather they operate p2p and that's has been nice for getting Fiat back in exchange. If there will be possibility of online business to accept bitcoin would be an achievement but we have a hand full vendors who does. It could have worth; if they are online accepting Bitcoin as a method of payment.

I think the best website for booking a hotel and a flight with crypto is Travala. I have friends who personally used the website and they had 0 problems with payments , checking in-out , hotel and all the service that website provided. Also the price might be a little spicy but if you search with a few days before you want to book it , you will find awesome prices like all the other websites. So yea , its worth a lot that you can travel with crypto.

As long fee is not much, i think it is worth. Because crypto or fiat i think not a problem if to pay something like book hotel or maybe buy flight ticket. In case we use wallet to make our transaction and not from exchanges. Because in wallet, sometimes they allow us to set fee manually as much as we want.

You can get many things with bitcoin. The number of businesses that accept Bitcoin is increasing day by day. It makes sense for new businesses to accept bitcoins or similar cryptocurrencies. We are already heading towards a new economic order.

Why would it not be worth to use crypto for payments online ?
It's just like any other payment method. It depends on the merchants whether they provide any offers for crypto as a payment method or not.
There are some merchants who do provide various offers for crypto. So I guess the answer would be yes, it is worth using crypto.
Besides that, it saves so much time since there is no hassle in this payment method.

Shopping with cryptocurrencies instead of fiat is good, but the access we've got is very limited. Maybe in the future we'll get to find more and more online stores accepting cryptocurrencies. Booking flight or hotel with cryptocurrency will be profitable as the market seems to be fluctuating forever. If we buy when the price of bitcoin is low, then it won't be profiting big.

its worthed to support crypto ecosystem, if everyone use crypto for "real transaction" like booking hotel, buying food, digital goods etc. im sure the ecosystem of cryptopayment it self will be famous, and all big marketplace will use crypto for payment processor, and goverment will open it to use cryptopaymen in legal condition.

My main problem with crypto merchants is a lot of the time they charge more than paying with your local currency, like it's some type of honour.

Sometimes it's because they don't have the same markets, but other times they just glue it on top and hope you won't notice or care.

If I compare a price for a flight from London to New York on January 23rd -27th it's $377 on Cheapair or the BTC equivalent. Booking direct on the same flight it's $341.

I'm happy to pay the same price. I sure as shit am not paying more.

So I guess sometimes they make you disscounts but times when you dont look or dont care... You might pay even higher Price!

Yes thats how it works *

If we want crypto to be mainstream of payment, acceptable by new business owner, gain more popularity and investors we have to welcome and use of every shops (online and offline) that add crypto to their payment system or else crypto will be see as an asset only.

yes it is very good, because it can attract some investors and also fans about cryptocurrency to increase, so that if the property entrepreneur slowly accepts payments via bitcoin it is already good news for bitcoin and other cryptocurrency

if you're looking for gift cards, egifter gives 1-5% discounts when paying with crypto. they also sometimes run promotions where you can get money off (or a free $5-10 gift card) when you pay with crypto.
https://www.egifter.com/

gyft used to give a flat 3% cash back on bitcoin payments, but that ended a while ago. :-\

others have mentioned purse.io because of the huge discounts.....i would be wary. the fraud risk is high.


bitrefill and coinsbee in particular.....huge markups. i guess they know most coiners are willing to pay the premium (or won't notice it).

At https://www.bitrefill.com/travel we have many options.

Our questions to you are:

Are you OK with giving your bank and credit/debit card processor's employees information about your travel?
and are you OK to give your banking/card information to travel agencies?

I have also noticed that some stores have expressed prices in fiat and crypto, but paying with BTC is in many cases somewhat more expensive. In this case, even though the merchant accepts BTC as a payment method, it still encourages the buyer to pay in fiat. I asked a merchant in my country why it was more expensive to pay at BTC, and he replied that he is just traying to protect himself from sudden price changes. But he actually uses a payment processor to protect him from the same problem, so the situation is a bit absurd. I think paying with crypto is still a good way to avoid paying taxes (except VAT), and that merchant playing on that card.

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OP paying with crypto can be very good sometimes, for example, if you buy BTC just a year ago for $3000 or $4000, value of those coins are go up 100% and you get more for your crypto. In case you buy BTC now and then use that crypto to pay for something, it probably won't bring you any benefits in terms of a cheaper price. However, I personally prefer to pay in BTC whenever possible, I see it as my small contribution to the promotion and adaptation of cryptocurrency.

It could be, although until now I also have not seen any hotel or service that wants to accept cryptocurrency as a means of payment. As for my country, some shops that accept payments using Bitcoin, for example, buy pulses, clothes, food and the like, but not for such services. might still be risky considering crypto there are still many pros and cons regarding legalization

Buy anything with crypto is good and simple. But i don't recommended you to buy something with crypto. Because the price of crypto is fluctual.
This is happen to me in 2017. When the Bitcoin price is ±$1200 and i buy a Video Game Giftcard with Bitcoin.
When i see the BTC price now, its makes me sad why i use bitcoin to buy something.

In my personal experience, when you pay with crypto, you get bit inflated prices. So better to use fiat unless you have no other option.

In theory, it has the same cost so, you can change the btc to fiat and shop online. The business here comes if the hotel or the online store is a holder. There is where he can get a big profit from sales.

Never forget the 10,000 BTC pizza, in that moment worth it, but if the buyer sees back nowadays he will feel bad about the $79,464,000 pizza.

so woth it. but i have been read that there is website accept booking hotel with cryptocurrency. but another problem is, transaction or pay with cryptocurrency need high cost every transaction. so if you buy or payment online with crypto It counted more expensive when you compare with fiat money

then if you do not want to waste your money for fees. i advice you be better to convert your cryptocurrency to fiat money

Well i think you're not gonna have a much cheaper price for the thing you are buying but it is worth using your cryptocurrency as a payment once in a while because it helps crypto to be known more to people and it is more convenient than fiat because you don't need to carry your paper money anywhere you go and means less hassle but for me i won't use bitcoin maybe i'll use the altcoins that i have in my wallet because bitcoin is way to precious to be used for shopping.