Bitcoin is starting to gain a steady flow of mainstream acceptance. At the Dubai Bitcoin conference last month, Destinia.com, the first online travel agency to accept Bitcoin payments in the Middle East, highlighted the growing popularity of this payment method in the region. Bitcoin (www.bitcoin.org) is a payment system and a new kind of digital money. It has been called, “cash for the Internet.” Destinia (destinia.com), a Spanish online travel agency has recently opened offices in Dubai to strengthen their regional growth, after seeing success with their Arabic team in Cairo. Destinia has been identifying growing markets in the Middle East in fields that until not long ago were unexplored, bitcoin payments being one of them. Bitcoin offers benefits in payment such as instant transactions and no merchant fees. For e-commerce, Bitcoins provide an alternative form of payment as they allow any person to purchase, without needing to be affiliated with any type of financial entity or institution. “Bitcoin payments are a practical modality that has been welcomed by travelers in 50 countries all around the globe; from Germany to Argentina, and now, we have brought it all the way to the Middle East,” explained Amuda Goueli, CEO and co-founder of Destinia “We want our customers to know that the Middle East is prepared to adopt this new virtual currency, and that Destinia is prepared to welcome and pioneer innovation.” Destinia has been accepting Bitcoin payments for a year. One of the advantages of Bitcoin is that its payments are immediate, even for international transfers, which can take days to be effective. Destinia noted that 2.6 percent of the payments made to it from in Saudi Arabia were made through Bitcoins. To facilitate the use of bitcoins, Destinia is showing prices on its website in either standard currencies or in mili-bitcoin (mBTC), in other words, a thousandth part of a bitcoin. Destinia offers a wide range of payment options from credit card to bank transfer or PayPal through Bitcoin. “Controversial or not, we see great potential in Bitcoin payments in the region as we already have experienced them in Europe,” said Goueli. “Right now Bitcoin is a niche currency, subject to questioning and skepticism, but in a world that is so strongly motivated by e-commerce, [the digital] economy cannot be expected to function in the same ways as it would in the physical world. The future is now, and now is the moment to embrace it.”
