Business travellers will be hit hardest by the crackdown on Airbnb
Road warriors are happy to use the service. But few will be satisfied with the back bedroom of a family home
By B.R.
BUSINESS travellers are embracing Airbnb more and more. New data from Concur, a travel-expense firm, show that the number of corporate trips booked through the home-sharing site grew by 44% in the second quarter of 2016 compared with a year earlier. Airbnb itself estimates that 10% of its bookings are now for work rather than pleasure.
According to Concur, the top three cities for Airbnb business travel, in terms of the amount expensed, are San Francisco, London and New York. That raises an interesting question. Two weeks ago Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, signed legislation allowing the state to impose hefty fines on people who rent out their properties illegally through Airbnb. Although there are exceptions, in essence the intention is to weed out hosts who let whole apartments, rather than just a room in their home. In San Francisco, meanwhile, the firm has agreed to try to limit the number of whole apartments that are let through the site. (Like New York, the city has no problem with house sharing.) London is generally more positive about the service—earlier this year Boris Johnson, then the city’s mayor, praised the firm for “helping to promote the very best of what London has to offer”. But even there, some local councils, such as Westminster, which covers much of the tourist district, are threatening to be more stringent in enforcing short-term-let regulations.
Given that all three cities, to a greater or lesser extent, are trying to clip Airbnb's wings, what effect will that have on business travel? Presumably it will be hit hard. Backpackers and weekend tourists might not mind camping out in a family’s back bedroom, but those preparing for client meetings and conferences will. Which is a shame, because staying in a local apartment makes a nice change for those used to a slideshow of indistinguishable hotel rooms.
Residents throw two accusations at Airbnb. The first is that living next door to an apartment offered for short-term let can be miserable. Having an endless stream of tourists on the other side of a wall, getting up to the kind of noisy, late-night shenanigans to which holidaymakers are prone, is not a recipe for a peaceful life. So in this regard encouraging more business travellers would, in fact, be a boon. (Road warriors may drink late into the night, but this is usually to cope with their lonely existence, rather than because they want to prolong the party.)
The second is that, as more residences are converted into full-time Airbnb accommodation, so locals are forced out of the neighbourhood. This is more difficult to argue against, other than to suggest that the kinds of areas that business people often stay in—mid-town Manhattan, say, or the City of London—tend not to be residential in the first place. Still, plenty more corporate travellers prefer to experience somewhere with a bit more soul, like the West Village or Notting Hill, where concerns about lost communities are all-too real.
So will Airbnb lose business trade in those cities that decide to clamp down on it? Probably most towns will reach some kind of compromise. Skift, a travel-industry website, has reported that Airbnb and New York are already trying to thrash out a deal, for example. So much will depend on where the line is drawn. But it doesn't necessarily look rosy for the firm. Berlin brought in probably the strictest rules of any big city earlier this year, which has led to a big fall in the number of professional Airbnb hosts. It is no coincidence that, according to Concur's data, use by business travellers grew 170% between the first quarter of 2015 and the same period in 2016—before the regulations were enforced—but has seen no growth at all since.
Airbnb is a wonderful tool. It provides much needed competition to hotels, and often helps bring tourist dollars to local businesses that might otherwise be squirrelled away in hotels' bank accounts. But if there is a lesson for the firm, it is that it cannot entirely ignore the concerns of cities and residents. It must be a partnership.
