Business travellers like Airbnb over hotels
Airbnb wants a share of the big business travel bucks; launches new tech to get it.
On the back of calls for government reforms from Tourism Accommodation Australia just yesterday, Airbnb overnight expanded its new product suite to sway business travellers to use its sharing economy platform over booking traditional hotel beds.
According to Wired, the new product suite expands upon Airbnb’s rudimentary launch of Business Travel last year to now include a central billing system and dashboard for travel managers to keep track of employee itineraries and spending.
The company said in the past 12 months, its business travel program has seen a 700% growth, which prompted the business to launch the features globally.
Airbnb told Bloomberg around 10% of its rentals are booked by business customers, and according o Global Business Travel Association, business travel spending is expected to reach over US$300 billion by the end of 2015 and grow by more than 5% in 2016, so it’s no surprise they are interested in nabbing some of this marketshare.
It also seems likely they will be successful in luring business executives out of traditional hotel rooms and into home-shares, if based on expense software firm Certify’s latest stats which revealed travellers rated Airbnb stays higher than hotel visits (4.72 stars out of five vs 4.04 stars for hotels) and tended to stay longer (3.8 nights vs 2.1), wired reported. The longer stays also translated to travellers spending more money per stay on Airbnb.
Airbnb raised eyebrows last month after news broke the 7-year old company could be valued at US$24 billion – which would make it more valuable than international hotel giants such as Starwood or Marriott.
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