Stablecoins Target Friction in Global Travel Payments

Stablecoins are an attempt to bring many of the advantages of blockchain technology to currencies, including transparency and settlement efficiency, while minimizing the extreme volatility that has traditionally characterized cryptocurrencies.

So far, their main applications have been as a bridge between “normal” money, especially the US dollar, and the world of cryptos, with stablecoins like Tether (USDT), USD Coin (USDC), and PayPalUSD (PYUSD).

However, more applications are needed for stablecoins to become not just a tool of financial experts and blockchain specialists, but a tool used in everyday life transactions. Especially as, unlike highly volatile cryptocurrencies, stablecoins are primarily designed for transactional use rather than speculative trading or as a store of value.

Viktor Manahov, a researcher at the University of York, is investigating in a new study how stablecoins could be used in the tourism/hospitality sector, especially when dealing with international trade and transactions. The research argues that stablecoins could serve as complementary payment infrastructure capable of delivering incremental operational improvements within hospitality organizations.

It was published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management¹, under the title “Stablecoins as a payment method in hospitality operations: A research note”.

Difficulties Of Hospitality International Payments

In general, any international transaction is an order of magnitude more complex and expensive than one occurring within a country’s borders. Merchant fees, foreign exchange spreads, settlement delays, and platform-based payment arrangements all make such transactions complex and costly.

One sector where this is especially true is tourism and hospitality in general, as the profile of visitors and receiving facilities can be extremely varied, and so are the currencies involved.

This is also a sector that is already embracing cryptocurrencies at a faster pace than most, with broader industry estimates indicating that approximately 11.5% of travel agencies now accept cryptocurrency-based payments.

Hospitality & Cryptos

Which Stablecoin For Hospitality?

Among all possible types of stablecoins, fiat-collateralised stablecoins are most operationally relevant to hospitality settings due to their comparatively stable value and their similarity to conventional electronic payment instruments.

They are among the most likely to help hospitality firms who face payment-related frictions arising from merchant fees, foreign exchange costs, settlement delays, and chargeback risks. Stablecoins may reduce these frictions by lowering dependence on intermediaries, accelerating settlement, and simplifying multi-currency payment processes.

It appears that while savings in transaction costs and settlement frictions are the primary drivers of this adoption, lower administrative workload and simplified back-office processes are also a strong motivator.

Stablecoin usage is concentrated among a small number of widely adopted instruments.

This suggests that hospitality adoption would likely involve a limited set of established tokens rather than a fragmented or unstable payment environment.

Building Hospitality’s Stablecoin Infrastructure

Stablecoins could find one of their strongest real-world applications in international hospitality, where foreign-exchange costs, delayed settlements, fragmented booking platforms, and complicated refund processes create persistent payment friction. Their near-term opportunity is not replacing credit cards, but becoming a complementary settlement rail for cross-border bookings and business-to-business payments.

New platforms are emerging to help hospitality providers meet customers interested in paying in cryptos effortlessly. Travala.com is one of the largest blockchain-based travel booking platforms, integrating stablecoin payments alongside conventional card and digital payment systems. It allows customers to complete accommodation and travel bookings using USDT, USDC, and other digital assets.

Similarly, Paypal introduced PaypalUSD (PYUSD), a stablecoin designed to support commercial payment ecosystems and blockchain-based settlement (see more below).

Hospitality Stablecoin For Customers

From the user position, stablecoins can provide faster, more predictable payment processing across hospitality platforms.

In particular, they may reduce delays in conventional banking systems, particularly for international transactions involving multiple intermediaries and currency conversions. This can be especially important for time-sensitive reservations, refunds, cancellations, and commission payments.

Greater payment transparency may also reduce customer uncertainty regarding foreign exchange pricing.

Simplifying The Payment Chain

Hospitality supply chains involve complex payment relationships among hotels, online travel agencies (OTAs), payment processors, suppliers, franchise partners, and other intermediaries.

This complex process makes reconciling commissions, refunds, deposits, and revenue-sharing arrangements across multiple systems difficult. It can cause disputes over commissions, delayed supplier payments, and inconsistencies in financial reporting.

In contrast, stablecoin-based payments generate transparent and traceable transaction records that facilitate reconciliation and auditing, and enable near real-time transaction verification, thereby improving trust.

Barriers To Stablecoins’ Adoption

Despite their potential advantages, adoption of stablecoins in hospitality (and elsewhere) is limited by regulatory, technological, and managerial considerations.

For example, fragmented and uneven regulatory frameworks across jurisdictions make compliance with rules about reserve backing, redemption rights, anti-money-laundering compliance, taxation, consumer protection, and data governance complex.

Stability risks with a new technology can also scare off some potential adopters, especially with the recent stablecoin depegging episodes, including the collapse of TerraUSD (UST) and the temporary depegging of USD Coin (USDC).

Additional operational barriers may include staff training requirements, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and customer unfamiliarity with blockchain-based payments.

Will Stablecoins Change Hospitality?

Stablecoins have great potential in sectors like hospitality, which are dealing daily with international transactions in a wide variety of currency pairs, complex payment systems, and overall unsatisfying fee structures and performance.

This could make the hospitality sector a perfect case study for the broader maturation of stablecoins: the important shift from consumers merely holding digital dollars to businesses integrating them into operational payment workflows.

However, important steps need to be taken to ensure stablecoins can achieve this path.

The first is mostly in official hands and regulatory in nature, including at the international level, and could remove a major obstacle and source of potential reluctance in the adoption of stablecoins by hotels, travel agencies, airlines, etc.

Another one is more in the hands of the crypto community, and consists of providing assurance that stablecoins are indeed stable and reliable enough to safely perform transactions routinely for a sector worth $5.86T in 2026 and growing 5.5% CAGR.

Investing In Stablecoin Adoption

Stablecoins themselves are designed to maintain a fixed value, so the investment opportunity is less about owning the tokens and more about the companies building the infrastructure that could make them useful at scale. Among publicly traded payment companies, PayPal (PYPL ) offers one of the clearest examples, combining an established global payments network with its own dollar-backed stablecoin, PYUSD.

PayPal Holdings, Inc.

This study directly mentions PayPal’s efforts in developing a stablecoin ecosystem as potentially important for the adoption of this technology by the hospitality sector.

PayPal describes PYUSD as a fully backed, dollar-denominated stablecoin designed for payments and blockchain integrations, while its merchant infrastructure provides a plausible bridge between digital assets and conventional business accounts.

However, the hospitality sector or stablecoins in general should not be the core of an investment thesis in PayPal. The company is still mostly a well-established “traditional” online payment company.

PayPal is no longer in the hypergrowth phase that characterized its earlier expansion, making future returns increasingly dependent on monetization, efficiency, and new commerce initiatives. It is still, in any case, a solid actor in the industry, processing 6.75 billion transactions every quarter, a transaction number that had grown 8% year-to-year in Q2 2026.

Besides its core payment business, the company is expanding in sectors like agentic payment (using AI agents), stablecoins, and identity/biometrics.

This could help the company restart growth, especially at the 2028 and later horizon, where it is planning to achieve a few results:

• Build the next-generation network and broaden in-store capabilities
• Scale AI commerce capabilities across the platform.
• Lead in digital identity and trusted verification.

Investors in PayPal will also likely be interested in the valuation of the company, with a P/E ratio in August 2026 of just 11.2, a remarkably low level compared to its peers and the general cohort of FinTech and AI stocks.

So PayPal could be a potential investment for value investors interested in exposure to the payment sector, as well as optionality in stablecoins, digital ID, and AI-driven commerce.

Latest PayPal (PYPL) Stock News and Developments

Study Referenced

^{1. Viktor Manahov. Stablecoins as a payment method in hospitality operations: A research note. International Journal of Hospitality Management. Volume 140, January 2027, 104851. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2026.104851}