I freely admit that the BitCoin thing has long passed me by – be it because I can’t be bothered to buy a rig to mine BitCoins or invest some hard cash into a variable digital currency.
Bitcoins have been used for different purposes – some rather shady deals, other for more interesting purposes, for example, Dell selling a server for BitCoins, a KitKat being brought, and so on.
Well, it seems you can buy airline tickets with Bitcoins too, with Air Lituanica, who accept the currency.
When Air Lituanica customer chooses to pay in bitcoins for the flight, his/her bitcoins are converted into euro or litas at the applicable rate. The virtual currency exchange rate is generated from the bitcoin exchange – Bitmarket. Payment in bitcoins for the flight is available for all types of Air Lituanica tickets.
So how does this translate? Well I did a test booking, and this is what came out.
So a pretty normal booking (604 Lithuanian Litas is about €175) . However, when you head to the payment page, there are different options…
And yes, Bitcoin seems to attract no extra booking fees. Which is nice. For those who want pay by credit card, it’s an extra 75 lats.. or €21 to handle the payment.
For those remotely interested, 604LTL worked out at 0.48353BTC (as of Tuesday Midnight).
Almost seems worth the effort to get some Bitcoins so you can avoid paying the credit card booking fee.
Bitcoins are accepted across Air Lituanica network. They’re also accepted by Air Baltic too.
It’s a reasonable way of turning something that’s virtual into something physical… and get a flight out of it too.
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