Travelers can soon pay for Norwegian Air tickets with bitcoin

Bitcoin will soon be available for use when purchasing tickets for Norwegian Air, the airline owned by the Kjos family. This will be done through an exchange that the airline company will be setting up where the transactions using the crypto coin will take place.

As it turns out, Lars Ola Kjos, the son of the airline’s owner Bjørn Kjos is a major investor in bitcoin, local news outlet Dagens Naeringsliv (DN) reported. Back in 2017, he bought $404,000 worth of the cryptocurrency. This was when the coin’s value was skyrocketing but was still below the $10,000 level that it is on now.

In order to facilitate the purchase and exchange of bitcoin for ticket payments, the airline will be setting up a platform called the Norwegian Block Exchange (NBX). This will be headed by Stig A. Kjos-Mathisen who is married to Anna Helene Kjos-Mathisen, the youngest of the Kjos daughters. On top of the ability to purchase tickets for the airline, it would appear that NBX also comes with other benefits.

"NBX's customers are given the opportunity to earn" cash points "on trades on the stock exchange, as well as on payments made through the payment solution NBX stock for the airline," Kjos-Mathisen said.

This makes Norwegian Air one of the few airlines that have made an announcement to accept bitcoin payments either now or somewhere down the line, Cointelegraph reports. Back in 2014, the first airline company to actually commit to such a trend was AirBaltic, a company based in Latvia.

It also makes sense that a Norwegian airline company is accepting bitcoin payments since Norway is actually one of the major mining hubs in the world. The industry faced a major setback last November after subsidies for electric operators were withdrawn by authorities.