Airbnb expands services into business travel ⋆

Airbnb expands services into business travel

Last month, Airbnb announced new initiatives aimed at the corporate travel market: creating a marketplace of sites suitable for offsites and meetings, promoting their Experiences product for team-building exercises, and providing relocation assistance to employees of companies that utilize Airbnb. Find out more about Airbnb business travel solutions below.

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The business travel market, estimated to be worth $1 trillion globally, has proven to be Airbnb’s most consistent driver of new business, with professional bookings tripling year-over-year for the last two years. According to a spokesperson, as of last fall, business travelers comprised 15 percent of total bookings, and Airbnb aims to increase that share to 30 percent by 2020.

Airbnb has made incremental steps towards providing more services for business travelers. In an example of sharing economy synergy, a now-defunct pilot program with WeWork provided Airbnb access to shared workspaces.

According to a recent Amex Global Business Travel report, rising demand for non-traditional meeting spaces is expected to continue to outpace growth in demand for other property types in 2018. In addition to homes, there are nearly 3,000 castles and 1,400 treehouses around the world on the Airbnb platform.

Today’s workforce is global and on the move. According to BDO, nearly 20 percent of employees around the world are eager to relocate.

Airbnb for Work – more than just business travel

Offering unique ways to travel for work will remain core to Airbnb for Work, but Airbnb estimates only 25 percent of employees within a company travel for work. With Airbnb for Work’s new expansion into team-building experiences, homes for offsites and meetings, and relocations, Airbnb have an opportunity to bring the magic of Airbnb to the rest of the workforce.

A little more than a year ago, Airbnb revealed employees from more than 250,000 companies around the world had signed up to use Airbnb for Work. Today, that number has more than doubled — to date, nearly 700,000 companies have had employees sign up and book with Airbnb for Work. Of all these companies, more than 275,000 of them are directly engaged with Airbnb to help manage their travel.

As more and more companies come on board, we’re also seeing significant growth in bookings: from 2015 to 2016, Airbnb for Work bookings tripled. And, from 2016 to 2017 bookings again tripled.