How Uber and Airbnb Are Winning Over Business Travelers in 9 Charts

The formerly-sharing-economy—now more accurately called the rental economy—is now in full disruption mode, not just at the edges.

Consumers have already spoken with their apps, especially for companies like Uber and Airbnb, and now the big change is coming to the hitherto relatively hidebound corporate travel sector.

Business travelers have adopted these services, especially Uber, due to the ease of use, and 2015 will go down as the year where services such as these started getting integrated with the corporate travel booking and expense tools.

One such expense company Certify, a cloud based travel and expense management software company, just released its Q2 2015 business travel expense trends, based on analyzing the habits of its users.

The data shows that Uber is very mainstream in United States now, and for the first time starting in the second quarter this year is now more popular among business travelers than taxis as a percent of all rides, a seminal moment if there ever was one for the business traveler transport economy.

While ridesharing pioneer Uber continues to gain ground against direct competitors and traditional ground transportation. The data also shows that business travelers are starting to choose Airbnb over hotels at an increasing rate, though still in early stages.

Below are eight charts that charts that growth of Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, versus taxis, car rentals and hotels.

Chart 1: Uber is fast evolving to become the preferred choice of business travelers for ground transportation in the U.S. For the first time more road warriors are choosing Uber over taxis as a percent of all rides.

* 153% increase between Q1-Q2 2015.

Chart 2: The growth of Uber as a business traveler expenses transport option versus taxis, over the last year, according to Certify data.

Chart 3: Uber has been in hyper growth mode.

Chart 4: Users overwhelmingly rate ridesharing services higher than taxi or rental car.

Chart 5: Not surprisingly, Uber is big in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where taxis were a nightmare to begin with. New York is the biggest volume market for Uber, though.

Chart 6: The other rideshare company Lyft is growing fast, but is in second place by a large margin. The top three cities with the greatest gains in ridesharing usage, below.

Chart 7: On the accommodation side, after Airbnb launched its business service a year ago it has seen significant growth from Q1 to Q2 2015. On average, business travelers are also staying longer with Airbnb than they are hotels.

*143% Growth from Q1 2015 to Q2 2015

Chart 8: The most popular cities for Airbnb with average expense amounts.

Chart 9: On average, Airbnb users rate their stay higher than those who use hotels.