From my personal experience, here are a few websites for purchasing airline tickets with payment via Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning! I particularly like the latter payment method – instant payments, no confirmations required, and importantly, no one can scrutinize your bitcoins because Bitcoin Lightning is very private in this regard. (Статья на русском здесь)
AlternativeAirlines.com – I recently discovered this site. I tested it personally and bought airline tickets through Lightning! It is possible to make large payments through Lightning! Importantly for Russians, you can buy airline tickets to Russia and back abroad here. This is especially relevant since the summer of 2024. Since that time, I haven’t been able to find flights through the second similar site – Travala.com – for tickets to Russia and back (I’m not talking about Russian airlines, but flights from foreign airlines). They use the Bitfinex node as the Lightning receiver. I assume Bitfinex has a ready API for sellers who want to receive payments. Most likely, this is what AlternativeAirlines uses.
Travala.com – The second site where you can buy airline tickets with Bitcoin Lightning, and importantly, book a hotel. The downside of Travala.com lately is that they no longer have flights to or from Russia. Previously, there were no problems. I link this to the fact that the Travala.com aggregator specifically excluded the search for all flights to this country. For Lightning, they use the OpenNode billing node. Here, as with the first option, you can pay significant amounts in Lightning. Accordingly, the same advantages of the Lightning network apply – there is nothing to scrutinize regarding the origin of the bitcoin, as Lightning payments arrive to the recipient from the nearest channel opened with their node.
In practice, neither company required KYC documents from me, nor did they demand AML procedures. It would be very strange to require such when paying for airline tickets, where the tickets themselves imply the presence of the buyer’s passport data.
