How to Book a Hotel With Crypto: A Closer Look at trip1
Spending crypto has usually meant selling it first. Travel is the clearest example. Most large booking sites either never took digital assets or quietly dropped support years ago, which left holders converting to fiat before every trip.
trip1 works differently. It is a hotel booking site where you can book hotels with crypto and pay straight from your wallet, across roughly three million properties worldwide.
New users get up to €50 off their first booking. Terms apply, and the amount scales with what you spend.
Below is how the platform works, which US cities its users book most, and what to check before you pay.
Booking a hotel with Bitcoin, step by step
Search for a destination and dates. Filter by price, location, or star rating the same way you would anywhere else. Pick a room.
At checkout, you choose a cryptocurrency instead of a card. CoinGate, a regulated payment processor, handles the transaction. Once it confirms on-chain, the booking goes through, and a hotel voucher arrives by email.
There are no card details to enter and no bank sitting in the middle. You also skip the currency conversion spread that card issuers add on foreign bookings, which on a $400 stay can run $10 to $12. trip1 says the whole process takes under two minutes. In practice, the on-chain confirmation is the slow part, and on most networks, that is a matter of seconds.
US cities worth knowing
American demand drives a large share of crypto travel bookings, and the inventory is deep enough that paying in BTC or USDC does not shrink your options.
Miami is the obvious starting point. The city has spent five years building itself into America’s crypto capital, and the hotel market shows it, from South Beach art deco properties to Brickell towers within walking distance of most of the industry’s US offices. High season runs from December through April. Conference weeks price like race weekends.
New York has the deepest inventory in the country and the widest spread between cheap and expensive. Midtown is convenient. Lower Manhattan makes sense for anything finance-related. Brooklyn costs less. Rates move sharply week to week here, so flexible dates pay off more than in most cities.
Las Vegas draws about 95,000 hotel searches a month. Resort fees make transparent pricing useful, and the city hosts a rotating calendar of crypto and tech events, so booking early matters more than the volume of available rooms suggests.
Los Angeles is spread out enough that neighbourhood beats star rating. Downtown puts you near Crypto.com Arena. Santa Monica and Venice cover the beach. West Hollywood covers nightlife. Choose a location and accept the traffic.
Austin has a real crypto and tech scene and a hotel market larger than the city’s size implies. Downtown and Rainey Street are where most visitors want to be. SXSW week is a different market entirely.
Chicago is the value pick. Hotel quality matches New York or LA at noticeably lower rates, with the Loop and River North covering most of what a visitor needs.
Orlando combines family travel with convention traffic, which means huge inventory and steep seasonal swings. Book well ahead for spring break and December. September is wide open.
Coverage extends to more than 190 countries, though the US pages see the most traffic.
Which travel sites actually accept Bitcoin
Three things separate a working crypto booking site from a novelty.
The first is inventory. A platform with 50,000 listings is not a competitor to anything. trip1 aggregates over three million hotels, including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, Accor, Wyndham, and Best Western, alongside independent properties, so you are not trading away the hotel you wanted in order to pay in crypto.
The second is which coins are supported. Bitcoin-only support is a common shortcut. trip1 takes more than 130 assets, including BTC, ETH, USDC, BNB, SOL, XRP, and LTC. That matters if most of your balance sits in stablecoins and you would rather not sell into fiat to book a room.
The third gets skipped most often: who processes the payment. Crypto checkouts fail in dull ways. A rate quote expires. A network fee comes in higher than estimated. A refund needs to be reissued. trip1 routes payments through CoinGate rather than building the integration in-house, which changes the risk profile.
Stablecoins or volatile assets
The two behave differently at checkout, so it is worth deciding before you get there.
Paying in USDC or another stablecoin makes the transaction act like a fiat payment. The quote you accept is the amount you send, with no chance that the asset moves before confirmation. If you treat your stablecoin balance as spending money, this is the simpler route.
Paying in BTC, ETH, or SOL keeps your stablecoin reserves intact. Quote windows are short enough that price movement rarely causes problems. Check network fees before sending, though. On a congested chain, the fee can eat a noticeable share of a cheap one-night booking, and switching to another asset usually costs less than waiting.
Either way, the room is priced in fiat and settled in crypto. What you are choosing is which balance to draw down.
Privacy and event bookings
Crypto payments on trip1 do not require KYC, so booking history is not tied to an identity file. Traditional travel platforms cannot offer this, and for some travellers, it is the main reason to use a crypto-native service at all.
The platform also runs hotel pages for specific conferences, including Bitcoin Asia in Hong Kong and European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona, alongside larger events like gamescom. Conference hotels sell out months in advance and gouge when they have not. Tracking those dates is a practical feature rather than a marketing one.
What about the price
The usual worry with a niche booking platform is that convenience shows up in the rate. trip1 pulls prices from several suppliers and offers a best-price guarantee: find the same room cheaper elsewhere, and they match it. No checkout fees, and no surcharge for paying in crypto rather than by card.
Run the same search on two sites, and you can check this in under a minute. Worth doing rather than taking on trust.
Common questions
Do I need a wallet? For crypto payments, yes. Card payment is also available.
When is the booking confirmed? As soon as the payment is confirmed on-chain. A confirmation email follows with everything you need at check-in.
Can I cancel? That depends on the hotel and the rate, and the terms show before you pay. You are dealing with the hotel’s own policy, not a third party’s.
Which coins work? More than 130, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, BNB, Solana, XRP, and Litecoin.
Is there a new user offer? Up to €50 off a first booking, terms apply.
Where this leaves things
Travel is one of the few everyday categories where paying in crypto has stopped being a compromise. The product is digital, delivery is instant, and the rooms are the same rooms everyone else books. The only difference is which balance the money comes out of.
For anyone holding crypto and planning a trip to Miami, New York, or anywhere else, the friction that existed a few years ago has mostly gone.