Airbnb on Wednesday launched a new feature that allows users
of its Airbnb Business Travel platform to book stays on behalf of others within
their same company.
With the enhancement, travel arrangers, such as travel
managers or executive assistants, will appear on a joint reservation where the
future guest and both parties will be able to alter the stay as well as communicate
with the host.
"Let's say you're a company and you've signed up for
Airbnb for Business," explained Airbnb's head of global payments and business
development Lex Bayer, "when you now do a booking, you have the option of
saying, 'I want to book on behalf of another employee in my company.' Then
you'll get a dropdown list, and you can select who that person is and book on
their behalf."
Bayer said Airbnb developed the feature after collaborating
with some of its corporate customers and finding this is something they wanted.
"We [also] care a lot about our hosts, and it was important for us to make
sure that the hosts always felt comfortable about who's staying in their
home," Bayer said. "To have multiple people on a profile in a
messaging thread—it sounds easy, but to actually build out the systems to
handle this was quite a deviation from what we've done before."
A little less than a year ago the company enhanced its
Airbnb for Business program with the launch of travel
manager tools, which allow corporate travel managers to view employee
bookings and itineraries at Airbnb properties, export companywide financial
data and reports in real time and centralize company billing for those
bookings.
While travel manager tools are not used for bookings, said
Bayer, " the trips show up in the Business Travel manager portal so [the
manager] can go to reservations and see that they booked that trip for someone
else or see that an executive assistant booked on behalf of another
person," Bayer said. "They get visibility into all the details of the
transaction."
Approximately 10 percent of Airbnb's total bookings are for
business travel, and travelers from 50,000 companies have booked a room through
Airbnb for Business. That figure does not represent the number of corporate
programs who've contracted with Airbnb or approved its use by travelers. Bayer
said Airbnb uses email domain names to track which company a traveler is with.
That same method is used to link travelers and travel arrangers within a
company.
Bayer said the company is playing well in the extended stay
space, with the average Airbnb business trip lasting about six days. "We're
also seeing that stay as a mix of business and leisure," Bayer added.
Fifteen percent of trips for business are for 10 days or longer.