Airbnb gets a foothold in business travel
Airbnb, which lets people rent out their homes to travelers, is finding its way onto business expense reports, says Tim MacDonald, an executive vice president at Concur, which operates a travel and expense system with more than 22 million users globally.
“Once millennials, who today use Airbnb for leisure travel, move up in their companies to positions that can dictate travel policy, Airbnb is on its way to being a legitimate accommodations choice for Fortune 1000 corporations,” blogged Jan Freitag, senior vice president for strategic development at hotel research firm STR.
Freitag told CNBC that the emergence of Airbnb in business circles is “less about the price and more about the feel,” adding that for traditional hotels to compete, they need to make changes.
The biggest business-travel opportunity for companies like Airbnb, MacDonald says, is in cities that don’t have enough hotel rooms, especially during a high-demand period such as a major tech conference in San Francisco.
But going the non-traditional route poses some problems for companies. MacDonald said it’s harder for companies to keep track of their traveling employees if the they don’t book through the traditional methods. And Freitag pointed out that the Airbnb-type properties likely aren’t meeting all the regulations hotels must follow when it comes to safety inspections or Americans with Disability Act rules.
“The premise for the rising acceptance of Airbnb as a legitimate choice for business travelers is obviously safety and security, and right now Airbnb is one lethal fire away from a public relations nightmare,” Freitag states.
Uh-oh, we’re meeting in Wyoming
If your annual company meeting is in an out-of-the-way location, it may be a signal that your company’s health is lagging. A recent report from two finance professors states that there appears to be a correlation between distant meeting locations and stock price declines over the ensuing six months.
The report, “Evasive Shareholder Meetings,” By New York University Professor David Yermack and Temple University Professor Yuanzhi Li, states that companies that held meetings at least 50 miles away from their headquarters and 50 miles away from a major airport generally underperformed the stock market by about 7 percent over the next six months. Yermack and Li compiled data on nearly 10,000 annual meetings held by more than 2,300 publicly traded companies from 2006 to 2010.
“Companies appear to schedule meetings in remote locations when the managers have private, adverse information about future performance and wish to discourage scrutiny by shareholders, activists and the media,”
the report states.
Of course, incentive trips are planned for more motivational destinations, but if your annual sales meeting is inexplicably located 10 miles from nowhere, you may want to prepare for a tough quarter ahead.
Airports increasingly become meeting hubs
As travel budgets shrink and companies scrutinize productivity, more business teams are meeting not in plush resorts or downtown hotels, but at an airport. “Regional and district meetings with an element of training have replaced the longer getaway in some cases,” Kristin D. Kurie, president of the Wilderman Group, a hospitality management company in Charleston, S.C., told The New York Times. They also hold the appeal of not spending an additional night on the road.
Seeing the demand, airports have been reconfiguring areas not suitable for other concessions. Portland International Airport and Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport have long had conference facilities. In recent years they have been joined by Sea-Tac, Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, among others.
These airport meeting rooms also provide competition to nearby airport hotels, which may require a shuttle or van to reach. The hotels are more convenient, and less expensive, than their downtown counterparts.
