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OTA CheapAir surpasses Bitcoin revenue milestone
Online travel agent CheapAir.com recently announced it has taken over $1.5 million in bitcoin payments since first adopting the crypto-currency late last year.
CheapAir.com became the first US online travel agency to accept bitcoin in November, rolling out a staggered bitcoin payment option for hotels, flights and Amtrak rail bookings for users.
CheapAir partnered with San Francisco-based Coinbase to process bitcoin transactions and convert them into a dollar value.
Jeff Klee, CEO at CheapAir.com has been pleasantly surprised by the success so far.
"We appreciate how easy Coinbase made it for us and in retrospect, it was one of the best decisions we’ve made for our business and our customers," Klee said.
"If our customers have a need, we’ll go to great lengths to come up with a solution," added Klee.
Celebrating the milestone, CheapAir has just awarded one Bitcoin user an expenses paid trip to London to attend the Bitcoin World Conference, which was won in a competition by student Patrick Cines, the Bitcoin club president of Penn State University.
Although the first, CheapAir is by no means the largest OTA to jump on the bitcoin bandwagon.
Expedia announced last month that it would start accepting the digital currency for hotel bookings and within weeks it had "exceeded expectations" according to Expedia vice president of global product Michael Gulmann.
Expedia also uses Coinbase to process transactions.
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Editor for TravelMole North America and Asia pacific regions. Ray is a highly experienced (15+ years) skilled journalist and editor predominantly in travel, hospitality and lifestyle working with a huge number of major market-leading brands. He has also cover in-depth news, interviews and features in general business, finance, tech and geopolitical issues for a select few major news outlets and publishers.
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