The room-rental site has attracted 250 companies so far
Marc McCabe has become a familiar name among people working in human resources departments around Silicon Valley. When it’s time to compile travel expenses for the month, McCabe, who runs the business travel group at Airbnb, would manually send out invoices and Excel spreadsheets breaking down how much a company’s employees spent on room rentals.
As the number of companies using Airbnb has ballooned to 250, McCabe’s monthly e-mails and the kludgy system of creating custom coupon codes that employees must enter when booking travel have not stood the test of time. On July 20, the San Francisco room-rental company plans to introduce a revamped Airbnb for Business, which includes a central billing system and a dashboard for human resources representatives and travel managers to track employee spending. The company is also kicking off a marketing campaign around the new business product.
Airbnb says it’s getting serious about going after corporate customers. The company introduced a rudimentary system called Business Travel on Airbnb about a year ago, after it received requests for such a service—mostly from other tech companies whose staffers might not mind crashing on pull-out couches. Corporate customers have since been asking for a more robust way to manage expenses and see where employees are staying. “Historically, it’s been a super-manual process,” says Mike Lewis, a product manager for business travel at Airbnb.
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