UK’s Biggest Travel Agency To Now Accept Bitcoins

By Rishma Banerjee

UK’s largest travel management company, Corporate Traveller is known to partner with small-medium travel spend requirements. As per recent reports, they will be accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as a legitimate form of payment which will be conducted through a third-party payment processor BitPay.

Andy Hegley, the General Manager of Corporate Traveller UK, said:

We identified an increasing demand from our clients for the option to pay in Bitcoin for business travel bookings made by our travel consultants… We chose BitPay to manage our merchant processing because they make it easy and handle the entire process of getting the Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash from the customer and depositing cash into our account.”

Using Bitpay will ensure that Corporate Traveller is not subject to the volatility in the prices of bitcoin price. The tradeoff, however, is that it won’t benefit from Bitcoin network’s speed (10-30 minutes) since BitPay’s settlement into GBP will take about 2 business days.

It seems as if accepting bitcoin is more of a PR move and BTC is merely just another payment option for the company who still receives fiat into their bank account without ever handling bitcoin.

Hegley adds:

The blockchain industry is growing exponentially and we are excited to be able to offer our clients the ability to pay in bitcoin, whilst having the reassurance of our settlement from BitPay being in pounds sterling… We believe Corporate Traveller is the first business travel management company to offer this payment option to SMEs in the UK.

Corporate Traveller operates offices in 20 locations across the UK. At the same time, its parent company Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) is the largest retail travel service provider in Australia.

The Brisbane-based retail travel outlet is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and has around 2,800 retail locations globally. Besides Australia and the UK, it has a presence in New Zealand, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Hong Kong, India, China, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. It was also hinted that based on Corporate Traveller’s experience with bitcoin payments, FCTG may also consider it.

Paying with bitcoin for flights, hotels and travel services in general, has already been possible for years. One of the first companies to pioneer bitcoin acceptance since 2014 was CheapAir.

Last year, CEO Jeff Klee, who views the experience of accepting Bitcoins as a more or less positive one, said,

Every new payment method has its own challenges, but accepting Bitcoin has been quite a positive experience for CheapAir overall. Any technical challenges we’ve faced have been overcome, and have mostly been met with patience and an overall team mentality from the BTC community.

Other platforms such as Travelbybit and even airlines such as Japan’s Peach and AirBaltic have been accepting bitcoin for quite some time now.