When Autodesk director of global travel and meeting services
Bruce Finch began to explore using Airbnb's corporate portal, "I went into
it kicking and screaming," Finch said at an Association of Corporate
Travel Executive conference in Tokyo. That attitude owed to both his own
"risk-averse" nature and his company's "very mature, structured,
even a bit conservative" travel program. It was a move that so far has
saved the software company more than $1 million.
Finch, working with Autodesk global travel operations
manager Mark Papale, first considered Airbnb when the homesharing platform launched
its corporate travel program in 2015. At the time, Autodesk travelers, who
number 4,800, often found it difficult to get the company's contracted rates at
busy times in key cities like Singapore, San Francisco, Boston and Portland,
Ore. At the same time, the company was dealing with higher operating expenses.
That meant finding savings in travel budgets became crucial, he said. "We
also had a dilemma: asking travelers to do more travel than before but also
asking them to do it with less money," Finch said. "Budgets were cut,
putting pressure on T&E."
Running a report through Concur revealed that some Autodesk
employees already were staying at Airbnb properties. In fact, the company's
relocation team had worked out its own deal with a third-party vendor that was
using Airbnb as a supplier. Considering the genie was already out of the
bottle, Finch decided to make it official.
He formed a task force that included risk management, legal,
HR, security and purchasing. The process was arduous, about eight months until
final approval, he said. "We had the same goal: trying to save the company
money and giving the employees the capability to do something outside of the
box but with safety and security as the No. 1 priority."
The task force came up with guidelines for use:
- Employees must stay in single-occupancy accommodations, or,
if team members planned to stay together, each must have his or her own
bedroom.
- Employees aren't allowed to stay in the "fun"
accommodations, such as boats, treehouses or yurts.
- Employees may not book larger spaces to accommodate their
families while traveling on business unless the cost is equal or below what a
preferred hotel would have cost. When the travel team notices someone has
booked two, three or four bedrooms for an individual trip, they get a phone
call inquiring why. "We want to encourage them to relax and enjoy
themselves but not at the expense of the company," Finch said. "There
are tax implications there, as well."
- Employees still are required to stay in preferred hotels
when negotiated rates are available, as Autodesk's hotel program remains
"very solid," he said.
Finch acknowledged that his status as an early adopter of
the Airbnb business portal contributed to his discomfort in exploring it. While
corporate travel programs have adopted ride-hailing rapidly of late, buyers
have shown more reticence on the lodging side. A recent Chrome River survey of
100 finance executives at companies that employ at least 1,000 showed that
nearly a quarter did not allow employees to use sharing economy lodging
services, while only 17 percent disallow ride-hailing services like Uber and
Lyft. Meanwhile, 61 percent allow or even mandate ride-hailing in their policies,
compared with 52 percent who do so with shared accommodations.
Even so, Airbnb reports rapid growth in its corporate
program. Since its 2015 launch, when about 250 companies were working with Airbnb's
corporate program, it has ballooned to 250,000, Airbnb business travel lead
Alvan Aiau Yong said. "Each week, 18,000 companies are signing up to use
our business portal," he said. "A lot are probably small and medium-sized,
with the bigger corporations taking longer."
For Finch, the fact that employees already were using Airbnb
was a selling point to get the task force onboard. Channeling those bookings
through the portal meant they also would go into the International SOS tracking
program, giving visibility Autodesk previously did not have.
Once the portal became available to employees, Finch was
startled at the pace of adoption. The biggest use for Autodesk has been in the U.S.,
followed by Singapore, where training departments book several months at a time
and handle the turnover themselves as employees come and go. "We also see
a large uptick of long-term stays in cities like Neuchatel in Switzerland,
where we have a big financial headquarters, and in Barcelona," Papale said
in an Airbnb-published case study. "This typically happens as we're
building out new sites and we have project managers or teams coming in."
Autodesk averages $11 million per year in hotel spend, and since
the program began in March 2016, it has provided more than $1 million in
"verifiable savings." When Finch pitched the idea to leadership, he
had estimated it would save about $100,000 the first year.
One use in Singapore alone brought more than $80,000 in
savings, according to Papale. An employee used a multi-bedroom home to host
training employees from July to November for $17,000; hotels for those
employees would have cost about $100,000.
Whatever
the savings, Finch said empowering employees to achieve savings squashed his
unease. "When we started to put the numbers together, 99.9 percent of
employees want to do the right thing—save money—and do it in a way that works
for them. It's incumbent [upon the company] to help employees do the right
thing for the company."