Economists who consider cryptocurrency without merit have likely never tried to book a last-minute charter flight after banking hours or paid the high credit card fees levied on a trip costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because although the charter industry is built partly on the promise of being ready when you are, that pledge is conditional: airplanes don’t move until operators get paid, and cryptocurrency advocates say it can sometimes be the best solution for making quick, low-fee bookings. Moreover, notwithstanding this year’s collapse in cryptocurrency values, customer demand for digital currency payment options continues.
Identifying the rewards and risks associated with paying for your flights with digital coins.
“A growing number of individuals are holding cryptocurrency and are willing to spend it, and they are ignored by many [charter] companies,” says Simona Moosar, business development manager at Ecommpay, a European e-payment processor that handles such payments for some two dozen charter firms.
The demand is reportedly driven mostly by 35-and-younger, crypto-savvy clientele, but the extent of that demand is hard to assess. Payment processors don’t make the information public, and some charter providers cite only rough uptake percentages, often without defining whether the figures represent customers or revenues. However, recent data indicates that between 23 million and 27 million Americans own bitcoin, the first and still dominant cryptocurrency.