April 07–Chip Wilcox, CEO of a small technology company in Singapore, travels to San Francisco a few times a year along with some employees to connect with potential customers and funders.
Instead of a hotel, they rent an apartment through Airbnb.
“It makes a lot more sense to have a place with a kitchen so we can cook; it feels more like home,” said Wilcox. The space does double duty as an office, hosting meetings and round-the-clock coding sessions for his firm Temasys Communications, a platform for adding real-time video to websites and apps.
Travelers who first used new services such as Airbnb and Uber outside of work are now using them to book rides and rooms during business trips. That acceptance demonstrates how the San Francisco startups have gone mainstream, and show a fertile ground for further expansion.
Even while both companies continue to fight regulatory battles, many big corporations are already tacitly endorsing them by reimbursing employees who opt for apartments over hotels, and Uber cars over taxis.
In fact, the apartment where the Temasys folks stayed is a full-time vacation rental. That means it violates San Francisco’s new “Airbnb law,” which says that only permanent residents can rent out temporary space, and that such rentals are limited to 90 days a year for entire apartments. Emily Benkert, CEO and founder of Guesthop, which manages it for the owners, said they are in the process of registering the unit and plan to comply with the law.
Local rules
But most travelers don’t know or care about local regulations — and corporations reimburse them either way. “They’re just looking for a place to stay,” Benkert said. She’s seen business travel grow to account for as much as half the nights she booked in March. Guesthop manages about 100 properties.
“We appreciate business travelers; they are usually pretty light impact on our properties since they’re not here to party,” she said. “They’re people with a purpose. They often travel in groups so it doesn’t always make sense for them to get separate hotel rooms.”
Underscoring their acceptance for business travel, Airbnb and Uber are now integrated into software from expense-account-processing giant Concur. A year ago Concur added the two to TripLink, its add-on for workers to book trips directly and still conform to corporate travel policies and gain automatic receipts for expense reports. TripLink also integrates dozens of traditional providers such as InterContinental Hotels and Marriott.
Concur found that younger travelers were interested in sharing-economy travel, said Mike Koetting, executive vice president. “Typically it was completely out of bounds for corporate travelers; it had no visibility to the corporate travel manager, who wants to know ahead what they’ll spend.”
At the University of San Francisco, faculty and staff often travel between multiple campuses in the city and tend to use Uber for on-demand rides. TripLink’s integration with Uber streamlined the process of doing expense reports as Uber receipts automatically showed up in expense reports, said Anna Kessel, USF disbursement analyst.
Huge Uber growth
Concur says the Uber usage it tracks grew ninefold from 2013 to 2014, while Airbnb usage tripled. Last year it said Airbnb accounted for $1 million in expenses processed in the first quarter, a small slice of corporate receipts but one of the fastest-growing lodging options.
An Airbnb survey found that about 10 percent of its bookings a year ago were for business travel, said Marc McCabe, Airbnb business travel lead, a position created about 15 months ago in response to the surge in demand. The company hasn’t done more recent research.
Besides the Concur partnership, Airbnb offers free tools for corporations, giving them corporate account codes so they can track business-traveler use, as well as invoicing services. It also has a business-search site, which filters out some of the more outre listings from the main site — no treehouses, boats or bunk beds. About 70 corporations actively use the tools, ranging from startups to giant enterprises with tens of thousands of employees, he said.
One thing Airbnb doesn’t offer is a corporate discount — yet.
“What’s been most amazing is the awareness (of Airbnb) in the corporate travel space and how it’s changed,” McCabe said. A year ago at a leading travel conference, many big corporations were just hearing about Airbnb for the first time, he said.
Of course, for companies already in the tech industry, Airbnb and Uber are part of the lexicon.
“Our employee base skews very young and very technologically savvy,” said Graig Mansfield, procurement manager at VOX Media, the Washington, D.C., digital-media company behind such websites as the Verge and Curbed. “We are constantly trying to figure out what’s cool and trendy.”
Many like it
Adding Airbnb to its approved lodgings was a hit with workers, who number 400 full-time plus 1,000 part-time and freelance. Still Airbnb use accounts for less than 5 percent of accommodations, Mansfield said. “It’s not going to replace our regular travel, but it’s a great complement,” he said. “If you put a bunch of people into a house instead of separate rooms, there’s a whole collaborative feeling about it.”
On a current trip, Wilcox and workers Arnaud Budkiewicz and J-O Hach are bunking for three weeks at a two-bedroom Noe Valley flat, paying $320 a night. “To get away with less than $150 a night per person and have a full kitchen — that’s a good deal,” Wilcox said.
And they endeared themselves to neighbors and the building owner.
“When we got here, we noticed the Wi-Fi was pretty slow and clunky,” Wilcox said. “So we put on our engineering hats, found the router bolted outside the door of the apartment. We moved it inside, reconfigured it and made it faster — for everyone in the building.”
Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @csaid
