Bitcoin Forum

Expedia, the big online travel site, announced on Wednesday it will begin accepting bitcoin for hotel bookings through its website.

Thus it is becoming the first major travel-agency to take the digital currency.

If the reception is good, the company said it expects to bring bitcoin to its other service lines as well.


Don't tell me this isn't great news!  ;D  ;D  ;D

It is great news, but that doesn't mean price will go up.

It's my hope that by them accepting it that other major players will follow suit adding to bitcoins growth and adoption.

What's the time scale of the poll? I don't think it'll do much or anything in the short term. Long term it adds a nice foundation to the launchpad.

It really does seem that the spread of Bitcoin is continuing. Very encouraging.

So, bad news causes price to drop but good news doesn't cause price to rise??? What kind of investment is btc???

A proper weird one.

It will take a little time for it to sink in and show up in the price. We have had such a run of good news lately that it doesn't have as dramatic an impact.

Time frame for the poll is for this month.

Unfortunately, it isn't.
Walk-in rates at hotels and direct airline and vehicle bookings are almost always cheaper than booking through sites like Expedia.
Frequent travelers rarely use Expedia. In fact, first-time users are usually crestfallen once they see the prices when checking in at hotels.
There is a reason why Expedia, Orbitz, Agoda, etc are all struggling - they do not have the volume to negotiate larger deals within the very fragmented travel and tourism industries.

650-750$ Is the right price because the news that Expedia accepts Bitcoin is a little part of BIG news (Ebay will start accepting Bitcoin in the next future, and Microsoft studing it now) !

I think even higher but time will tell. BTC is definitely currently undervalued.

Won't be long before other travel agency starts accepting bitcoin also.

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I reported that already: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=649203.0. Bitcoin value (http://www.bitcoinvalues.net) went down by $40 on that news!

You and I reported it on the same day however mine was at 2pm PST and yours at 11PM PST

As for your second link all it did was take us to bitcoinvalues.net nothing showing that you predicted it going down $40

The price of BTC will likely not react instantly to new companies accepting bitcoin, but it would rather be a long term positive effect as over time more people will be inclined to purchase (and use) bitcoin.

This is against my pre-conceived notion, so I'll give it a try. I have a particular hotel in the middle of nowhere I'm interested in. It's $90/night (after taxes/fees) online booking a bit over a month in advance. There's nothing I know of going on there on the date I've planned, so I'll try getting a room later at night on the day we go there to see what kind of deal they can do. If I can come in at <$75 for the room, I'll become a true walk-in believer.

There's a good bit of irony here since I would've booked through Expedia before reading this. ;D

I'd be interested in your findings. I believe hotels have a special "rack rate" for walk ins. And it's higher than pre-booking.

I did find that a local travel agent (small business) consistently gets me rates equal to or lower than expedia and agoda.

I definitely don't think this will have any specific effect on BTC price changing. However though, more and more big name companies are starting to accept Bitcoin payments every single day it seems. And this is great news overall. So by itself no huge price jump, but as a smaller part of the big picture snowball effect, it will help in the long-run.

I think the news will pick this up and thus will bring more users seeking to use/understand bitcoin and jump on the train before it leaves the station. Maybe by the end of the month btc will be in the 700's :)

Third party booking sites are almost always cheaper.

Frequent flyers don't use them because they don't get you elite status and it doesn't earn miles.

This is why it is so great that companies in various industries are starting to accept bitcoin.

When overstock (a discount retailer) accepts bitcoin, priceline (a discount travel site) is not going to pay attention as to how successful it is. However when expedia accepts bitcoin, priceline will notice how much they get in sales and how their market share will (likely) increase, giving them an incentive to accept bitcoin as well.

The more industries that accept bitcoin the more widely it will become accepted.

Seem like bitcoin still have other negative news which cancel out positive news.

Buy on every dip.

This tactic has work every time for the last 5 years.

In regards to the poll, it seems we've dropped below even the lowest estimate. Goes to show you the unrealistic expectations piled onto this kind of news.

Exactly. People holding bitcoin is gambling right now.

Yes it will definitely help in the long run. However short term I think the price could still rise by the end of the month becuase of more users seeking out bitcoin either to get on board, info, etc. So possibly more people will be investing in BTC thus driving the price up a little for the month of June.


Bitcoin itself is a gamble just as stocks in the US are a gamble but stocks have a tad more predictability.

The price of bitcoin often can have very wild swings.

This is still a very short time period to be looking at the price of bitcoin.

The poll is really geared towards the longer term price.

We need more good news to have more business adopt and consumers to get more interested

No one can tell what happen tomorrow let alone long term trend of bitcoin.

This is true but you can look at the current situation to help get a good idea

Just a matter of time before more merchant accepting bitcoin.

Yet another big company accepting Bitcoin. This is looking good.

good choice expedia, i'm sure i book hotel room using bitcoin with them
since i don't use credit card, bitcoin is really good solution
by the way, which bitcoin exchange prices do they referred?
yeah i hope so, $700 is good price for bitcoin ;D

Seems to not have boosted the price. I hope not too many people start booking vacations on Expedia and it starts suppressing the price...

As a few others have pointed out, its not about this news will or will not effect the short term price of Bitcoin, its about Bitcoin, albeit slowly, getting more and more mainstream companies to accept it as payment.  Overstock was a good start because they are $350MM publicly traded stock.  Dish was another nice announcement (especially if AT&T buys them).  Now Expedia is another major publicly traded stock valued at nearly $10 Billion that will start accepting Bitcoin.  Wider acceptance is what we want Bitcoin to do right now.  Price increase will follow, not immediately, but eventually.

When companies accept bitcoin they will often sell the bitcoin in exchange for fiat as they must pay most of their bill in fiat.

Expedia must hire (or use existing) employees to manage the bitcoin process, monitoring sales, selling the bitcoin to pay it's fiat bills, explaining how the process works to customers, ect.

These employees will see how well bitcoin works in general and would possible become adapters of bitcoin themselves.

I didn't even think about the individuals within the company that would could potentially be new players just because of their companies choice to accept BTC. Nice pointing that out  ;D

Why thank you. Although this would be a relatively small number of people, I would think that anyone at the company that deals with the bitcoin side of things would almost certainly be at the very least get interested in Bitcoin

I can't imagine but a relatively small team is involved with the bitcoin process (from Expedia). Don't they process through Bitpay or something?

This reminds me of how travel became the first real category (excluding media) where folks were willing to use the Internet to pay for something tangible. It could definitely have a positive effect on the adoption but then again, we will need to wait for others to follow suit before we can judge.

Have to be either bitpay or coinbase.

If Expedia is smart and a tad risky they would hold those coins and profit from it later on down the road.

No way is any company of scale going to keep 100%, and I'd be surprised at > 1%. BTC economy is tiny, and these companies have real fiat overhead to be concerned with. They are not investors, IMO.

I'm buying some tickets for the mid-east (Jordan) later this week, maybe I'll try these guys out and see what kind of price I can get?


QUOTE FROM BELOW:

Aww, that's the least useful part of their service.  :-\

I think it's hotels only for now.

It's basically the only part they make money on.  I think they -might- get $5 per plane ticket, some none.  Same with car rentals.  Hotels they have deals with the sites to get a nice spread on -some- of the hotels, some no spread whatsoever.  Thin margin business for sure.

Ah, that makes sense. Frankly, since google flights I never use anything else for air tickets. I consistently find crazy low prices via google flights. 

I never heard of Google flights. They need to get on the ball like Expedia and accept my btc!

You should check it out. It's amazing. However they do not sell tickets. They do what Google does best, they just show where the best price is.

https://www.google.com/flights/

Wow, this is awesome. Thanks for sharing. This has a much better search and interface than any other similar service I have used. Thumbs up! :D

That will kill off a lot of airline and travel agency.

I believe that these prices are if you were to buy directly from the airline. With a travel agency you buy from the agency who buys from the airline, and the airline may have special/different prices for travel agencies.

It's been around a good few years, but Google has an odd tendency to not advertise its services except on its own services (commitment to "eating your own dog food" dogma, I guess), so a good few people miss their sometimes goofy, sometimes "killer app" projects. When I was first introduced to GFlights by word-of-mouth, I believe I was told it's actually based on an older open-source project with a name I can't remember but which is almost as effective (still better than searching flights with "normal" third-party agencies). Of course, Google's the company which hides boat-loads of games and easter eggs in all their products (GMaps, GTranslate, new ones for each major update of Android, YT, and their primary web search engine all have a good few)... they just seem to like to hide things away and have it be kind of mysterious when consumers stumble over them.

But still they could increase their margin with Bitcoins. For example, Bitpay charges only 1% where Visa / Master charges 2.8%. So even for flight bookings they could make significant profits if they use Bitcoin.

They would also no longer have to deal with fraud related issues with are almost certainly above 3%

Newegg is joining the bandwagon.

The fraud related issues would be costs in addition to the ~3% that credit card companies charge

I believe Newegg had been on the Wagon for some time now. Expedia I'm sure has had enough with visa taking their profits and will soon flip the switch to allow all their services to be paid via bitcoin.

1800 flower joining.

And master card is patenting payment with bitcoin using credit card.

ETF will be listed around year end.

Lots of positive news, I don't think the price fully reflected it yet.

How did I not see this before? This is great news and I am glad to see another company jump on the bitcoin train as they say and start accepting it as a form of payment. I don't see the price of bitcoin going up though just because a company like Expedia starts to accept it.

Bitpay has make the process easy for any web store to accept bitcoin with no fee.

The day of paypal and credit card domination are over.

Companies still need to understand the regulatory risks associated with accepting bitcoin as well as the counter-party risk with bitpay. These are both very important things for any merchant to take into consideration.

Bitpay has deep pocket funded by VC is this is non-issue.

As for regulation, if US really want to shoot itself in the foot, the companies can set up offshore companies to accept payment.

Offshore acceptance of bitcoin by a US company would likely add to the potential regulatory liability. If they do this then it would look like they are trying to hide what they are doing even if they have good intentions. If a company were to break a regulatory rule unintentionally then they would likely receive some level of forgiveness. 

Little user experience in Expedia's bitcoin payment...

Well... it will be very short!
It's very easy : you scan the qrcode and the coinbase confirmation is immediate!

There is one problem : it's provided on expedia.com so I had to pay in $.
In fact, that's not a problem at all  ;D : the conversion $<->BTC<->€ follow the official price of $/€

It has worked perfectly for all my reservation this summer.

We still need to get consumers to understand the benefits of using bitcoin. We do not need bitpay to charge 0% fee to merchants for bitcoin to have a cost advantage over credit cards and paypal. Even with the fee being the same as a credit card bitcoin will have an advantage due to the lack of fraud and chargebacks.

You're right. The cost of chargeback/fraud would be so much lower.

This is exactly why more merchants should accept bitcoin for payment. Stores could charge several percent less then the cost of accepting credit cards and still end up on top. It is more or less impossible to impose fraud on merchants that accept bitcoin and requiring confirmed transactions (at least with the average size of transactions today).

I've booked using btc on expedia and the process is great.  Hotel rooms only though, airlines isn't supported yet.  Great way to use btc.