The US-American online travel agency behind the expedia.com website will in future enable the payment of the more than 700,000 accommodations using crypto-currencies. A partnership with Travala.com has also been agreed.

The company, which was founded in 1995 and has its headquarters in Washington, employs around 20,000 people. In the first quarter of 2020, Expedia achieved a turnover of approximately 2.2 billion US dollars. Expedia Partner Solutions (EPS) – a subsidiary of the company – had enabled Travala.com to grant access to a so-called “Rapid Application Programming Interface”, which now allows Travala users to directly offer Expedia’s accommodation to their customers.

Users should be able to choose their preferred payment option

Alfonso Paredes, Senior Vice President at Expedia Group, explained that the company wanted to provide users with the preferred payment method. This makes it logical to also add digital currencies to the payment and to drive innovation in this area.

Travala.com currently has around 2 million accommodations on its site, with an additional 700,000 to be added. The provider’s holiday homes are available in 230 countries. Travala had already concluded such a deal with the platform Booking.com in November 2019 and added 90,000 accommodations to the booking site as part of this cooperation. This cooperation resulted in a 33 percent increase in turnover.

Travala has an AVA token

Travala.com is a one-stop travel booking platform that combines the best features of booking websites with the advantages of decentralized technologies and tokenized incentive structures. The associated Travala Token (AVA) has a market capitalisation of €13.4 million and a current circulation of 39 million tokens. The total supply is 61.2 million tokens, while the current price is approximately $0.40. In the last 24 hours, the token has seen a price increase of approximately 30 percent, possibly due to the announcement of the partnership with Expedia.

Only recently, the Travala company merged with the flight booking service “TravelByBit”. The aim of this merger is to offer an enhanced service to travelers who want to pay with crypto resources.

*Originally published in German at CVJ.ch