A Holiday Inn hotel in Brooklyn, New York City, will start accepting payment in Bitcoin.
Charlie Shrem, a Bitcoin pioneer, announced Sunday at the Hester Street Fair that he will be piloting a program for Holiday Inn where the hotel would be accepting bitcoins in payment.
This week I'm piloting a @HolidayInn in NYC to accept #bitcoin. More details to follow !
— Charlie Shrem (@CharlieShrem) June 15, 2014
Shrem told NewsBTC that the hotel was adopting the program to make payments for foreign travelers easy.
"The hotel caters to European tourists and one of the things they are excited about is the fee savings and mitigating chargeback risk," Shrem told the website.
"Accepting a European credit card comes with almost double the fees as US credit cards and much more chargeback risk."
Visitors can reportedly make bitcoin reservations online, in-person or through phone. Shrem added that while the hotel will convert a percentage of the sales from Bitcoin to USD to cover some expenses, it intends on keeping a bitcoin reserve as well.
Shrem also asserted that if the pilot program does well, more hotels will start adopting the cryptocurrency.
The hospitality industry is slowly opening up to the virtual currency. More recently, Expedia, a major online travel agency announced that it would accept Bitcoins for hotel bookings on a trial basis.
This is one of those ideas that seemed to have sprung from three different places all at once," said Michael Gulmann, vice president of global product at Expedia told The Wall Street Journal. "We want to start at a reasonable, small place."
Bitcoin is back on track again after it gained tremendous notoriety for the Mt.Gox exchange meltdown and being used on Silk Road -the online black market - for illegal transactions. A large number of companies are starting to adopt the cryptocurrency for its ease of use and decentralized operations.
Several NASDAQ listed companies like Zynga and Tesla have already started accepting Bitcoins.
Bitcoin has also become a popular investment tool. Commenting on the virtual currency's popularity, Tim Chang - an investment banker who also helps run a Bitcoin management fund - told Fortune:
"I think bitcoin investing is becoming to this generation what real estate investing used to be. But it's a lot more unusual than real estate, so we're helping people understand, manage and secure it."
New York City has been seeing a lot of Bitcoin activity of late with realtors accepting rent in the virtual currency. A Balinese villa also set a record selling for 800 bitcoins a few months earlier.
