Expedia accepts payment with bitcoin for hotel booking

 If Bitcoin is no longer the one in the media now that the case has been Mt.Gox forget the most famous crypto-currency continues to trace its way. And it can now count on a new ally: Expedia, the online travel giant.

There are a few months, Bitcoin was more than $ 1,000 and had an important echo in all media, notably because of the spectacular failure of Mt.Gox, a site that at one time was the largest platform exchange in the world. So for now, 600,000 bitcoins disappeared have not been found (800, 000), the crypto-currency has withstood the storm and in vogue now a little calmer waters, with a currently ongoing around from $ 635.

Expedia. Com, one of the largest online travel agency in the world has announced that it accepts payment with bitcoins to settle hotel booking, but only on its website main in the United States. A scale experiment that will allow the company to see if there is an interest in it to offer this method of payment for other services, such as booking flight tickets, for example. One can easily imagine that if successful, the offer could happen on other sites in the group as Hotels.com or even its local versions.

According to Expedia, this movement is not surprising and is simply part of its strategy to grow the business. "We believe that there is a real potential for growth Bitcoin as currency. We see it growing and we want to be part of it. If you look 14 or 15 years ago, PayPal was a very strange thing in the middle of e-commerce, and now it has become something very common, "explains Michael Gulmann, vice-president of Expedia.

In practice we need to see how much of the reservations will be set in this way. If Coinbase, through retained by Expedia for transactions is not very talkative on the volume of payments that records, Overstock, another of its customers ensures its have recorded $ 1.6 million of orders settled via Bitcoin, between 9 January and 27 May 2014. It expects to reach the figure of 15 to 20 million by the end of the year. In comparison, the annual turnover of Overstock was $ 1.3 billion in 2013, the Expedia. Com and all Group sites stood at $ 4.7 billion .