Bitcoin Forum

I was wondering if Expedia is still accepting Bitcoin.

I tried to book a flight and an hotel from France (expedia.fr).
Bitcoin is not a payment option.

That being said I keep finding articles saying that Expedia accept Bitcoin in 2020.

So, Is Expedia still accepting Bitcoin?
For which products?

They stopped accepting bitcoin  (https://www.forbes.com/sites/lukefitzpatrick/2019/03/07/expedia-a-cautionary-tale-for-cryptocurrency-in-travel/#d49c5f3f0b99) in 2018. The articles you found might be based on some old (outdated) ones, that's probably why it's still listed there.

As an alternative, you can buy gift cards for HotelGift or FlightGift from Bitrefill.com.

Flightgift prices have one of the worst premiums attached to them I've ever seen and that goes for every single flight I've ever checked. Sometimes it can be more than 25%.

There are not many travel gift vouchers available for Bitcoin but lastminute.com vouchers are available from Bitrefill and Giftoff and their pricing is at least competitive with the normal market. Even then they can be not so good. They also do hotels as well.

As for the original question, Expedia only experimented with hotels for BTC, never flights, and as above they don't do it any more.

skip the vouchers. i'm a big fan of cheapair.com---they accept bitcoin payments directly with BTCPayServer: https://www.cheapair.com/blog/update-on-our-search-for-a-new-bitcoin-payment-processor/

they've been accepting BTC since 2013 and they are a genuinely thoughtful and pro-bitcoin company with good customer support. they even have dedicated phone/email support just for crypto customers!

so i like to support them even though their prices tend to be a bit higher (~2-8%) than expedia. they are sometimes competitive but on average expedia definitely undercuts them.

As was said - they're not since 2018.
I've heard about Travala service (not advertising in any way) - I have not tried it, but I've seen some news that they're travel company which is accepting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies apparently.
Moreover I've heard they did sort of collaboration with booking com which is wide known.
Anyway, as I said I'm unaffiliated person just consider to at least check 'em out.

Cheapair doesn't list many budget airlines in Europe so they're effectively pointless for Europeans unless they're going long haul. Budget airlines are usually 2-5x cheaper than the obscurities Cheapair throws up and are vastly more numerous in the times and routes offered.

And I still don't see why anyone should be paying a premium for the honour of spending BTC. On checking one flight there, London to Boston, Cheapair are $50 more for the exact same flight.

You could use a service like Bitpay to pay for the flight and hotel with bitcoins. Or a service related to that.

How can I use Bitpay as a customer ?

You can't. It's each merchant who integrates Bitpay. If they don't do it then you can't pay with BTC.

The closest alternative to Expedia available to pay with BTC will be lastminute.com as they sell hotels and flights.

You can buy gift cards for Bitcoin for it here - https://giftoff.com/gift-cards?filters%5Bsort%5D=alpha&filters%5Bcategory%5D=15&filters%5Bcountry%5D=80&page=1

maybe things are different in the states. i've seen fare differences that were pretty negligible.

it's not just for the "honor" of spending BTC either. cheapair is an awesome company that genuinely does right by its customers. expedia is the polar opposite---they fuck people over left and right, are misleading about prices and hidden charges, and they have horribly unfair refund policies. their online reviews make it very clear who i would rather deal with:

https://i.imgur.com/tNR9vqK.png
https://i.imgur.com/sBVGdyr.png

if you've ever been fucked over by expedia (i have been), you won't mind paying a few % higher to use cheapair. it's worth it for the smoother experience and peace of mind.

that they are huge bitcoin supporters, use BTCPayServer instead of bitpay, and have dedicated crypto customer support is just icing on the cake. :)

You can buy gift cards directly from BitPay by using their dedicated wallet (https://bitpay.com/wallet/). They don't offer Expedia, but they do offer Delta for booking flights, Hotels.com for booking hotels, and Princess Cruises for booking cruises.

Side note: I occasionally make use of their gift card mall, but I would advise against using BitPay as your regular wallet. In addition to lacking Segwit support, it has horrible fee estimation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5127701.msg50488798#msg50488798).

I completely forgot about that.

Since OP appears to be in the EU they'll be offered a completely different selection of cards. Bitpay is showing me lastminute.com and Virgin for travel options. I think that might be Virgin holidays rather than airlines but I haven't checked.

Hello,

here you can see our Travel offering for every country or region: https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/travel.

Besides the tourist package aggregators we have everywhere, we sell some Airline cards to buy directly with them, for example in the USA Delta and Southwest, in Australia Jetstar.