Hotels.com now allows online shoppers to earn rewards in Bitcoin. As one of the top travel sites in the world, Hotels.com has partnered with Lolli, a rebate service that rewards customers with BTC for shopping at partner websites.
According to the announcement, Lolli users can earn up to 3.5% of their purchases back in Bitcoin when booking at one of Hotel.com’s 325,000 hotels across approximately 19,000 locations.
Lolli already has partnerships with Priceline, Booking.com, Hotwire, Hilton, Marriott and VRBO, giving customers a wide range of travel options. Says Lolli CEO Alex Adelman,
“According to SimilarWeb, we now have 2 of the top 3 travel sites in the world with Booking.com and Hotels.com, providing near-complete coverage of almost every major hotel across the world.
Airbnb (#2 travel site in the world) has been holding out to partner with Lolli but their top competitor, VRBO.com (#11 travel site), has been one of our top performing merchants, giving people the ability to easily earn bitcoin when they rent homes and apartments. VRBO boasts properties in 190 countries around the world.
Direct hotel brands like Marriott (#6 travel site in the world) and Hilton (#10 travel site) have also performed incredibly well on Lolli.com.”
Lolli works through a browser extension. The company has formed partnerships with top retailers in a mission to spread Bitcoin and spark adoption. Each time a Lolli shopper makes a sale from a member merchant, Lolli gets a percentage of the transaction. Instead of keeping the full amount, Lolli shares it by sending free Bitcoin to the user’s Lolli wallet.
Shoppers can hold onto their crypto or cash out and withdraw to a USD bank account once they’ve reached an available balance of $15 and after the partner’s reward locking period has passed, typically 30-90 days after an initial purchase or completed stay.
According to the Lolli team, domestic and international travelers spent nearly $1.1 trillion in the US in 2018 alone.
“Imagine for a moment, that just 5% of U.S. travelers used Lolli to earn bitcoin. That’s $55 billion in spending across 16.2 million people. At ~3.5% bitcoin back, that’s about $1,925,000,000 (~170,354 BTC) in bitcoin earned per year. All with a few taps on your keyboard.”
Hotels.com became part of Expedia in 2001. The mainstream brand pitches a lifestyle of leisure and fun and has promotions targeting travelers, mobile Millennials and its 104,000 Twitter followers.
For its latest summer fling, the company says it plans to pay someone $10,000 to be a professional pool-hopper. Applications closed on June 25th for job-seekers hoping to lounge by the pool at several hotels across the US this summer.
“The poolhop’s responsibilities are simple. Travel to some of the most incredible hotel pools across the country, sip on fruity drinks, snap some photos, sport a hotel robe, and report back to reward loving Hotels.com fans.”
