Travelers will now be able to use Solana-based digital dollars to book flights across more than 300 airlines, according to a recent announcement.
Nomadz, a crypto-focused travel booking platform, has expanded beyond accommodation and launched flight bookings.
According to the announcement, the platform now provides access to more than 300 airlines alongside over 1 million stays.
Nomadz is sweetening the launch with zero fees on flights for the first 30 days alongside some other perks.
How this works
Nomadz acts as the crypto-friendly booking layer between the traveler and the travel industry. Users search for a conventional airline ticket through the platform and pay Nomadz using stablecoins. The resulting reservation is still an ordinary airline booking, so hundreds of airlines are not suddenly accepting crypto.
Nomadz has already been using this model for hotels. The Solana-native travel aggregator has primarily used $USDC for settlement and Solana Pay as its payment infrastructure. It also maintains an on-chain travel identity system.
A similar integration
In fact, another remarkably similar integration went live just nine days ago.
On Sept. 15, Cryptorefills launched its application in the Solana dApp Store for Solana Mobile’s Seeker and Saga devices. The company allows users to pay with SOL or $USDC for flights across 300 airlines and for more than 1 million hotels and short-term stays.
Payments settle over Solana in seconds at negligible network cost, which makes the network an attractive option for such a use case.
Emirates takes the more direct route
There has also been movement at the airline level. Emirates launched Crypto.com Pay for flight bookings in July. Emirates itself has added the payment option to its checkout, which is dramatically different from the aforementioned integrations.