It’s well known that vacationers can rent a room — or a whole home — on Airbnb. But the company, one of the giants of the sharing economy, is dedicating attentions to another sort: business travelers.

That segment already makes up about 10 percent of Airbnb’s business, and it expects that to grow to about 30 percent of its core business areas by 2020, David Holyoke, Airbnb’s global head of business travel, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

As to how Airbnb caters to the business travel market, Holyoke pointed to its preselection process.

“We’ve curated from our 4 million homes overall a category called business-travel-ready homes … Additionally they offer convenience features, the ability to check in 24/7… if you’re a business traveler, plans can change quite a bit,” he said.

Airbnb is also trying to make business travel convenient for companies, including tracking employee expenditures.

“We’ve built out a suite of products and tools … a dashboard for them to manage all of their employees’ visibility and where their folks have traveled or are traveling so that if they have to respond to situations they have that ability to mobilize them,” Holyoke explained, adding that the company has integrated with partners said as Concur.

Source: cnbc china
Airbnb is hoping business travelers will forgo hotels