This week, room rental/non-traditional accommodation marketplace Airbnb announced that it was to allow employees to book business travel for their co-workers. It means that the booker or manager as well as the traveller can now see details of the trip and make changes to the reservation.
Lex Bayer, head of global payments and business development at Airbnb, said of the announcement, "More and more business travellers are choosing to stay with Airbnb while they are on the road, so they get the chance to not just visit, but live in a city, even if it's for one night. Our hosts offer more than just generic hospitality, they help travellers live in the heart of local neighbourhoods. We are excited that this product update will introduce a whole new segment of business travellers to this experience."
We thought we would take this opportunity to crunch some of the numbers so we have created the following infographic for this week's chart.
Continued after infographic
Airbnb says that business travel usage has increased threefold in 2016, although it still quotes the figure that business travel makes up 10% of bookings, suggesting that it is not growing as a proportion of total bookings.
A recent survey of frequent business travellers by AudienceNet on behalf of the Guild of Travel Management Companies in the UK found that just 2% wanted to stay in Airbnbs and similar 'sharing economy' properties compared with 75% who wanted to stay in chain hotels. Among younger travellers, the figures were 4% and 70%, hardly a generational gap in tastes.