Live on Bitcoin in Japan for 30 days series #2 - Airfares to Japan with Bitcoin

Freedom to travel, without the bank picking your pocket

Imagine a bank run begins and you're trying to withdraw your money but the bank doesn't have it to give you. Meanwhile your government is trying to seize your livelihood, so they can distribute it as rations so they can keep their system afloat a little longer. You know that you have limited time to move before the airports and borders are shut down but you're unable to buy a plane ticket allowing you to relocate and reestablish yourself.

Or if you feel that this is an unlikely scenario then just imagine being free to travel without being forced to pay the VISA or Mastercard fees when you purchase your tickets, yet while still being rewarded with points for all of your purchases. With Bitcoin, this is completely possible!

De-centralized aviation travel, sites that allow you to purchase plane tickets using Bitcoin

I was actually surprised how easy it was to discover airfare pages that will accept Bitcoin as payment. Using duckduckgo bangs and a reviewing sites such as Steemit and Reddit I eventually came up with the following shortlist:

• https://www.cheapair.com/
• http://destinia.com/
• https://www.abitsky.com/
• https://www.fluege.com/de/

Price comparison

I loaded www.google.com/flights in a private window to verify the price of tickets if I were paying in fiat currency and found a return flight package with JAL that had wifi, allowing me to work and blog during travel. Then, knowing which flight I wanted I went looking for the same package in my shortlist of BTC accepting middlemen.

I then converted AUD to USD and found that cheapair.com had the tickets available for slightly more than the Google price, but less than the others. Without the fees added on I think it works out about the same.

Issues during purchase

There was a very scary moment during all of this. The coinbase backed BTC payment portal on cheapair.com has a timer of 15 minutes however when I sent the Bitcoin it took 1 hour to confirm. When I saw the payment had failed I thought that my next few hours would be doomed to sitting on support calls trying to get my money back. In reality it wasn't so bad. Cheapair.com were very responsive via their telephone support, with almost zero time spent on hold. Once I got through to the support representative he advised me that once the BTC transaction has been confirmed, it will eventually process and my tickets will still be confirmed. It didn't occur as fast as he said but I received my confirmation by the time I had woken up.

Guess who's going to Japan!

So there you have it, one can quite easily purchase plane tickets and travel freely without a banking third party being involved in the transaction, at least from the customer side.

Next steps are to plan accommodation and internet access. Please follow me and stay tuned for more information!