Cryptocurrencies

The Colombian Way offers a fully featured and automated e-commerce platform for tours in Colombia. We offer multiple payment options, so can you use cryptocurrency to pay for your tour to Colombia?

The short answer

No.

Oh, why not?

We have explored multiple options for implementing cryptocurrencies within our website and for a number of reasons we have decided that none of the payment gateway partners are fit for purpose at this time.

User experience

All payment gateways are different and offer different ways to integrate with our e-commerce platform. Some would allow clients to pay within our checkout in the same way as credit cards do, others would authorise payments on an external gateway in the same way that PayPal does.

None of them offer a clear, logical and consistent user experience. Gateways offer a clunky integration within our checkout page that interrupts a smooth buy-flow. Gateways that authorise externally lack finesse, do not offer multilingual support, do not work consistently and may also cause detrimental layout changes to our checkout.

Broader integration

A payment gateway of any kind needs to not only take your payment, its API needs to integrate fully with our e-commerce platform to update it with the progress of your booking. We have not identified a functional payment gateway that fully integrates as intended.

Testing

Whilst some gateways differentiate between test and production environments. We have not identified one that actually has a functioning test environment. We will not implement untested technology on our website.

Reputation

Cryptocurrencies are based on trust and secure technology. Whilst we do not have doubts about security, our clients do need a trustworthy platform. Even some big-name platforms have undesirable online reputation ratings. Users cite little or no support, duplicate billing, and badly conceived dashboards and apps. We are unwilling to partner with a gateway provider that makes errors and then does not have support available to resolve them.

The broader ecosystem

We are mindful that people wanting to spend cryptocurrencies will be aware of the limitations, however there are multiple issues surrounding the use of cryptocurrencies that in our opinion make them not consumer ready. Mac OSX has no native way of specifying a default wallet to launch with a cryptocurrency URI. Android also seems to have no way of nominating a default wallet app. iOS does not recognise a cryptocurrency QR code as meaningful data.

Compared to slick integrations such as Google Pay and Apple Pay, the use of cryptocurrencies as a payment mechanism appears to be unacceptably clumsy and unfinished.

Limited customer benefits

Much as we are excited by the prospect of a world where consumers are empowered and monetary instruments are decentralised, we see no significant benefits in paying for travel services with cryptocurrencies at the moment. Admittedly it’s futuristic and cool, but cryptocurrencies offer none of the consumer protections that our existing payment methods offer. We want our clients to feel confident in the payment methods that we offer.

What about in the future?

We love the concept and as is evident above, we have spent time evaluating various options for implementing this functionality within our e-commerce platform. Despite the limited benefits, cryptocurrencies do offer buying choices to people that do not have access to or do not want to use traditional banking systems. They also offer better value payment processing which in turn means better value for consumers.

We will continue to monitor cryptocurrencies and when a gateway integration matures to a state where it overcomes the issues mentioned above we will be happy to implement this functionality. On 30 March 2020 PayPal announced that it would enable cyrptocurrency payments for all US users. Our platform already offers Paypal and for the time being our company’s acceptance of cryptocurrencies will align with the PayPal rollout.