When Travala became the first ever flight and hotel booking company that accepted multiple types of crypto as payment myself and a lot of the crypto-passionate world took notice and celebrated that they had done something like this. I ended up buying some Travala (AVA) as a result but unfortunately it hasn't been performing very well and they don't really get a great deal of the booking market. I question whether or not they can remain solvent for much longer but perhaps putting this out there will direct a few more people to at least check them out.
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I was messing around with the site the other day to see if I could include them in my upcoming travel plans but I ran into issues almost immediately. For starters, they offer the same "low price guarantee" that almost any other booking site has but unfortunately, it seemed that almost anything I looked at Travala was the most or nearly the most expensive option available. I don't know what the process is to get the price matched by them but I, and probably almost anyone else out there, isn't willing to go through the extra steps necessary to make this happen.
They also had far fewer options for bookings than other sites, and this is not a good sign.
I have my suspicions about how this might be the case because one would think that people would be lining up to buy things with crypto.
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They accept far more coins than I would have expected and many of these I have never even heard of. There is one major problem here that I hadn't thought of when I first signed up though and that is anonymity. Most of the people that I know that are involved in crypto don't like the idea of their name and personal information such as a passport number and date of birth and all that, being associated with crypto. Many of the people I know that are heavy into crypto do not want their government to know that they have ANY of it, let alone thousands of dollars worth of it. When you make a booking, you have to provide personal information and while they promise that they will not share this information, is that really the case?
I can see them being audited at some point and being bullied by various governments to reveal their customers names and how they paid for taxation purposes an then this information being used against the customers. What a nightmare it would be to book a flight using crypto and then a month later the IRS is calling you to ask you about it.
Not everything is a conspiracy theory but I think we can all agree that the main reason why the government has a problem with crypto is because it is far more difficult for them to tax you on it. For now, the reason why a lot of people get away with it is because they NEVER attach their real name to any transactions that they make and unfortunately, that simply isn't possible when you are booking a hotel and especially a flight.
So I would imagine that most crypto bros would be very hesitant to use Travala and since their prices are actually NOT the lowest (in my searches anyway) non crypto-bros are going to be quite unlikely to use it as well.
If you are planning a trip in the future though, I would appreciate it if you would at least have a look at Travala.com to see if their price is competitive. I would really like for them to succeed.