BridgeStreet Pushes Corporate Housing Towards a Mini-Revolution in Online Booking

Sometimes a website relaunch is more than a website relaunch. Sometimes it represents a watershed moment in a sector. This week's relaunch of bridgestreet.com has the hallmarks of being a watershed moment for corporate housing — especially for the travel managers who book it. BridgeStreet Global Hospitality is a Reston, Va.-based company that provides corporate housing to more than 4,000 companies, such as Tesla, Disney, and Liberty Mutual. It leases or manages 4,000 furnished apartments and houses. It also aggregates 60,000 properties supplied by professional property managers. Its website, which officially is relaunching on Wednesday, will make all of these properties instantly bookable online. The site, in essence, becomes a mini online travel agency (OTA) like Expedia -- with inventory from multiple property operators, including many of the luxury vacation homes managed by AccorHotels' Onefinestay brand. Easier for Suppliers Until now, suppliers of corporate housing have found it technologically difficult to distribute their inventory to the systems used by most corporate travel managers. That obstacle has had the knock-on effect of making it difficult for travel managers to book serviced, extended-stay apartments within the managers' preferred online systems. BridgeStreet has come up with a solution, one that could be mimicked by competitors and do for corporate housing what Airbnb, HomeAway, and others are doing for sharing-ec