Understanding How Airbnb Empowers Hosts With New Business Travel Strategy

At the annual Airbnb Open 2015 conference in Paris last week — before the city was thrown into crisis by mass shootings and bombings, and the final day of the event was called off — Airbnb launched its new Business Travel Ready program to help hosts make their properties more attractive to corporate travel managers and employees traveling on business. According to a keynote speech on Friday, business travel is one of three primary growth markets for Airbnb moving forward, along with Chinese travelers on the buyer side, and non-urban destinations on the supply side. Following that, Jonathan Liebtag, business development lead at Airbnb, presented a session about Business Travel Ready, which is still very much in its early development stages. The program builds on the July expansion of the Airbnb For Business corporate travel platform, which now includes an online dashboard featuring central purchasing and billing functionality, employee tracking, and streamlined ex