As promised on Friday, the bitcoin community’s own Charlie Shrem has announced that a single location of the Holiday Inn hotel chain will be accepting bitcoin in New York City.
Shrem made the announcement today at the Bitcoin Fair (which takes place at the Hester Street Fair), in which he included that he will be responsible for piloting the program at the hotel this week.
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Shrem told NEWSBTC Sunday that this is the Park Slope Holiday Inn Express location on Union Street in Brooklyn — a hotspot amongst foreign travelers.
“The hotel caters to European tourists and one of the things they are excited about is the fee savings and mitigating chargeback risk,” he said. “Accepting a European credit card comes with almost double the fees as US credit cards and much more chargeback risk.”
Shrem says that bitcoin reservations can be made by phone, online, or in-person, and depending on the response the hotel gets, they may or may not expand the program to other hotels.
“If it goes smoothly, we plan on rolling it out across more locations and other hotels in their group,” Shrem said.
This week, online travel giant Expedia.com announced they too would be accepting bitcoin for hotel rooms as part of an initial pilot program. Depending on the success of that program (or lack thereof, if appropriate), the company says they could expand acceptance to other services like flight booking.
As for the Holiday Inn Express Park Slope location, they are seemingly going all-out with their bitcoin pilot.
“The hotel plans on keeping some a percentage of Bitcoin sales in Bitcoin and convert to USD just to cover their expenses,” Shrem said.