Travel and housing leasing community Airbnb officially announced into the business travel market

Absrtact: July 29, the travel housing leasing community Airbnb officially announced into the business travel market. The company announced that it would work with the travel management company concur to make it possible for corporate customers to directly book apartments or rooms from concur Triplink services and

July 29, the travel house rental community Airbnb officially announced into the business travel market.

The company announced that it would work with the travel management company concur to make it possible for business customers to directly book an apartment or room from the Concur Triplink service and fill out the expense form automatically.

In addition, the company has launched a new business travel portal to help users search for rented rooms that may appeal to the workplace.

Airbnb, head of business development and global payments Rex Bai, said the rental rooms for business people would have some key features, such as Wi-Fi and Internet access.

Bayer said: "We are committed to helping business people easily find suitable accommodation for work travel." ”

For the current hot Airbnb, business travel is a market with large profit margins. It seems that the competition with the hotel for ordinary Airbnb to the "battlefield" to expand to business people.

According to Bayer, room bookings on the company's Web site last year accounted for only 8% of the total.

It is reported that Airbnb into the business travel market has been the support of some large technology companies, including Facebook, Salesforce and Eventbrite and other 30 technology companies have Airbnb's business travel portal into their business system.

Tim MacDonald, executive vice president of platform and data services at Concur, says more and more professionals now prefer to make their own travel accommodations and to find cheaper and more desirable accommodation through other sites such as Airbnb, Tim McDonnell. McDonald's estimates are now about half of the hotel bookings for business travel done by individuals rather than corporate travel agencies.

At the same time, MacDonald also pointed out that this behavior also exposes a greater risk, such as the inability to control the cost of travel, compliance with corporate travel regulations and possible financial fraud, and concur software to circumvent the above behavior.

However, while aggressively moving into the business travel market, Airbnb may incur stricter scrutiny from the hotel industry and regulatory authorities. Before that, Airbnb's business model raised concerns about safety, regulation and taxation.

In April this year, Airbnb raised $450 million trillion, its market valued at $10 billion trillion, to become one of the most overvalued start-ups backed by a VC firm. (LI)