Then I remembered what an accountant friend once said to me: "Hotels are big portals between the black and white worlds".
So you may have black money in bitcoins (and a Hotel which is your "legal business"), and want to "wash" it? now you can do it through Expedia (they having a bite in the process, hence their motivation).
If its primarily a PR move, the reason for starting with hotels is simple: Expedia, and all the OTAs (Online Travel Agency), make the VAST majority of their profit from hotel bookings* due to two factors:
1) Airlines pay extremely small commissions (starting with when Delta announced 15 years ago they wouldn't pay commissions on flights)
2) Hotels pay extremely high commissions, since unsold hotel rooms disappear as inventory the next day
Assuming the goal is PR, Expedia cares much more about getting consumers to think of Expedia as a place to book hotels than they do booking flights- thus they are "starting" with hotels.
*For example, in 2013 Priceline sold 270M hotel nights and 7M airline tickets. Of their $7B in revenue and $2B in profit, very very little came from airline ticket sales.
When I read that, I thought of people making trips that they would prefer no one finding out about. Affairs, etc. I guess that's also a legitimate use case for adopting BTC.
10k comes in as bitcoin bookings (2-3 rooms per night). 10k-laundry fee gets paid as dividends to an "investor," "consultant" or anything really. The reservation books are paper.
Many consumer facing service businesses fit the bill, but hotels are a nice big category. It makes sense for them to be accepting internet payments.