Bitcoin's relationship with the travel sector could be getting serious after a leading German tech platform announced plans to integrate the virtual currency into its payments engine.
Ypsilon.net, a German travel tech business with B2B and B2C products, will allow its subscribers to accept Bitcoin from customers via a payment gateway API from specialist BitPay.
The partnership is important because of the scale of Ypsilon's business - it apparently powers 80,000 websites worldwide, including 80% of those active in Germany.
The first Ypsilon.net customer to start taking Bitcoin payments via the Bitpay API is www.nurflug.de.
Bitcoin has been around as a travel payments option since the end of 2013 when CheapAir.com, a US-based OTA, started to accept it.
Expedia.com started accepting Bitcoin in June 2014 for some of its hotels, but a report a year or so later highlighted some of the issues specific to Expedia, others applicable across all potential merchants.
Air Baltic was the first airline to accept Bitcoin payments on its website, but had a run-in with the Bitcoin community when it was forced to drop a transaction fee on payments.
And in-flight retailing specialist GuestLogix added Bitcoin to its "transaction processing engine" at the start of last year, around the same time as Spanish OTA Destinia.com joined the Bitcoin club.
These examples, and others, show that Bitcoin does have some appeal to some businesses in travel But, as in the e-commerce space generally, it has yet to become mainstream. Other "alternative payments" options, such as Paypal, also struggled to get mainstream travel acceptance.
The deal with Ypsilon, remembering that Germany is Europe's largest leisure travel market, could be the bellweather of mass-market adoption for Bitcoin.
Having said that, the bell might already have tolled, according to a report published today on the BBC web site headlined "Bitcoin - Is the crypto-currency doomed?"
Related reading from TnoozBlockchain technology has payments promise for travel companies (Sept 2015)
AirBaltic hops on Bitcoin bandwagon, transaction fee vanishes (July 2014)
Bitcoin begins inching into travel as an alternative means of payment (Nov 2013)
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