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Airbnb Grew 249% In 2015 For International Business Travel

Airbnb Grew 249% In 2015 For International Business Travel

Airbnb, a San Francisco-based website that lets people list, find, and rent private lodging,  experienced 261-percent growth in the U.S. and 249-percent growth in international destinations for 2015, according to a travel expense report-tracking service,  VentureBeat reported.

Certify, a provider of travel and expense report management software, announced the results today of its third annual SpendSmart report for 2015. The cloud-based platform tracks business travel expense spending across major categories such as food, airlines, lodging and car rental.

Airbnb has over 1.5 million listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries.

In Africa, the 7-year-old company has about 40,000 listings, according to a report in  ChristianScienceMonitor. The number of bookings in South Africa – the leading market – has grown 259 percent over the past year. Morocco is close behind with thousands more listings from Kenya to Mauritius.

In the U.S., top Airbnb cities were San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Oakland and New York, Venturebeat reported. Internationally, the top cities for Airbnb in 2015 were Vancouver, London, Toronto, Mexico City, and Sydney, Australia, according to Certify.

In addition to Airbnb, Certify identified a number of sharing economy companies that are beginning to get the attention — and money — of business travelers. They represent a small but growing part of overall spending. These include Hotel Tonight, WeWork, and Postmates.

Airbnb is part of a wider trend in Africa toward a tech-fueled “sharing economy,” where networks allow consumers to crowd-source everything from taxi rides and Wi-Fi to antiques and tractors, ChristianScienceMonitor reported.

Ride-hailing giant Uber is now in Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa. Several thousand Wi-Fi users in South Africa recently joined Fon, a global service that allows them to share extra monthly bandwidth in exchange for access to a network of free hotspots worldwide tapped from other members’ connections. In Nigeria, a start up called Hello Tractor is using text messages and mobile money to connect rural farmers to rentable tractors.

Airbnb is filling a niche — or gap — between local budget hotels and the expensive international chains, ChristianScience Monitor reported. The service has fed into a longstanding demand for reliable, mid-range accommodation in many African cities.

For $50, you can stay in the 51st floor penthouse of Africa’s tallest apartment building in downtown Johannesburg — dinner included. Or you can stay at an Airbnb-listed accommodation maintained by the Kigali art gallery, which teaches art to genocide survivors and impoverished youth.

Airbnb says it was designed for micro-entrepreneurs looking to earn income sharing their space with visitors. In Africa, this model is especially valuable in markets where tourism infrastructure may not yet have caught up to demand, said Nicola D’Elia, Airbnb’s general manager for the Middle East and Africa, in a CSM interview.

Like Uber, the tech-based Airbnb is not without its critics.

Ufi Ibrahim, CEO of the British Hospitality Association, said Airbnb is causing mass disruption to the hotel sector, putting pressure on London housing stock and driving up rents, according to a BigHospitality report.

She has slammed Airbnb for allowing its users to run potentially dangerous “pseudo hotels” exempt from fire, food and health regulations. She  described home-­exchange websites as being “industrial in scale” with professional landlords operating outside regulations and endangering the safety of the public.