Bitnet has partnered with UATP, a global payment solution owned by several major airlines. Thanks to that partnership about 260 airlines will accept bitcoin.
The fact that UATP and Bitnet became partners is likely to make happy those travellers who use bitcoin. Now, they can travel the world paying for their tickets with this cryptocurrency.
UATP (Universal Air Travel Plan), a payment processor owned by different airlines, announced implications of the above-mentioned partnership having realised the importance of this venture. It’s worth mentioning that lots of airlines such as British Airways, US Airways, American Airlines, JetBlue, Japan Airlines etc use UATP’s method of payment.
Now these airlines can accept bitcoin as payment through the Bitnet and UATP partnership. Along with air travel, hotels, car rentals and Amtrak all hold the possibility for bitcoin integration.
Ralph Kaiser, UATP president and CEO, commented on that quite important and ground-breaking travel partnership in a press release:
“We are very happy to be partnering with Bitnet to add bitcoin to our payment platform. We are always looking for skilled partners to bring additional forms of payment to the UATP processing platform and Bitnet fits the bill well.”
Akif Khan, Vice President of Solutions Strategy for Bitnet says that UATP and Bitnet “share the same mission of lowering transaction costs and fraud risk for their clients.”
“Partnering with UATP was an obvious choice for Bitnet. Our partnership will make it easier for UATP’s member airlines to accept payments in bitcoin via a lightweight integration that avoids impact to downstream systems and leverages existing UATP reporting and refund interfaces.”
The Bitnet team having formerly worked for CyberSource and Visa, has a profound experience either in payments or in fraud management systems for airlines.
Today, the travel industry seems to be one of the most off-the-wall industries to embrace, support and get involved with the technology and cryptocurrency. For instance, in November 2013, CheapAir, an American online travel agency, started accepting bitcoin payments for flight bookings. Since then, the firm enlarged its services by increasing railway offerings and the number of partner hotels to 200,000.
In 2013, Richard Branson, a famous entrepreneur, announced that his space flight venture Virgin Galactic would start using bitcoin and two months after seven people paid for tickets in the cryptocurrency and were confirmed for the flight.
In June 2014, Expedia, the largest online travel company in the world, started accepting bitcoin for hotel bookings, becoming the first major travel organization to have payments in digital currency.
The partnership of UATP and Bitnet shows one important thing: traveling the world on bits seems to be easier than ever.
Eugenia graduated from Minsk State Linguistic University with a degree in Intercultural Communication, Translation/Interpretation (Italian, English). Currently she works as a business analyst, freelance interpreter and tutor. She’s fond of numismatics, photos, good books and sports, adores travelling and cooking.
