Business travel is changing more and more thanks to Airbnb
Airbnb is getting more and more business guests. The number of sleepers who arranged a room for a business trip via Airbnb tripled in the past year, according to the company blog post . There are now more than 700,000 companies that arrange their business trips via the service. Airbnb attributes that to the work that they have put into Airbnb for business.
This initiative was aimed at giving business travelers an easier way to travel for work without sacrificing the comfort of home. According to Airbnb, not only the way we travel for work, but also the way we work, has changed.
Travel differently, work differently
There are a number of new trends in travel that Airbnb has discovered. The first of these is Bleisure. It is the combination of business travel with one or more days of ‘vacation’ to discover the place where they are. It is also logical: if you can not bridge a weekend for too much money or spend a few extra days somewhere, you would be crazy not to do that.
More and more people are traveling in groups. Where that is often an impersonal situation in a hotel and you only see each other during dinner and meetings, a shared Airbnb makes it possible to get closer to each other on the personal level. It also often works more easily and the setting in which you do that is a lot easier. It talks easier at the kitchen table than at a rented space without any appearance.
Airbnb also sees much longer trips. It has become a lot easier (and affordable) to sit somewhere for a longer period of time, precisely because you are not stuck to an expensive hotel in the center of a city where you do not necessarily have to sit and that often also further away from your temporary workplace is then necessary. According to Airbnb, stays longer than 14 days have increased by a factor of three in the last year.
Top ten places to work
Of course there are certain places where people stay more than others. Airbnb has a list of the top ten places where they welcome business travelers, and the list will not surprise you at all:
- London
- Paris
- Los Angeles
- New York
- South Bay, CA (Silicon Valley)
- Toronto
- San Francisco
- Boston
- Sydney
- Washington , DC
Despite that, the number of travelers that Airbnb uses for work is still ‘only’ 15 percent of the total supply. That can, according to the company, be a lot higher, so they remain busy making business travelers easy. They are working with large companies to show Airbnb results in their internal booking tools. If they succeed that will certainly be good for the company, although the real hotels will be far from happy with it. Whether the invasion of Airbnb is really such a positive thing for mainly tourist spots remains to be seen but for business travelers it can be a godsend.