Airbnb and the Solo Female Business Traveler
Skift Take
There are a lot of things that Airbnb hosts can do to make solo female business travelers feel more safe and comfortable, but there are also many female travelers who will never book an Airbnb alone.
Airbnb’s strengths can also be liabilities for many solo female business travelers.
The platform has grown increasingly popular every year because of its ability to connect travelers to local communities by offering a more immersive, authentic, and affordable travel experience for business and leisure travelers. It's also a portal for self-discovery because it offers access into so many varied neighborhoods around the globe.
Airbnb is about experiencing the destination on your own terms. It's about freedom, personalization, choice, and self-determination, but it also requires a degree of flexibility and independence on the part of the individual traveler.
That very lack of structure is what causes concerns among many females traveling alone to business meetings and conferences.
Their questions are many, including: Who else has keys to the listing? What if I need to call someone in an emergency? Is the neighborhood safe? Is the place clean? Will I feel comfortable if I can lock the doors completely from the inside? Who is the host, and how can I trust him or her? Can I trust the reviews?
Airbnb has safeguards in place, of course. Hosts and guests are verified through a number of identification requirements, and both sides review each other to provide a public record of behavior for each. But questions persist.
So we spoke with one female meeting planner and five women who've booked Airbnb for business purposes while traveling solo. Our goal was not to make broad generalizations but to better understand their concerns, and provide context around them.
Beginning with Tracy Stuckrath, president of Atlanta-based Thrive! Meetings & Events, she is a meeting planner who's well positioned to speak about Airbnb in terms of the unique user experience for female business travelers.
Stuckrath books Airbnb consistently when she attends conferences she’s not personally organizing. She is also an active Airbnb host who rents out her house to guests while she is both home and away. For her, Airbnb's value proposition revolves around price and a more local destination experience.
“I'm always going to book Airbnb because I'm an independent planner who doesn't want to spend $200 to $400 on a hotel room for three or four nights,” she said. “I do think there’s a trend there where more convention attendees are looking at Airbnb, and it depends on where your convention is and the availability in that city, but some people
