Airbnb has gained some clout among corporate travelers, and the company is reportedly looking to take advantage of that momentum through a new partnership with Sabre.
Reports Wednesday (Mar. 1) said Airbnb is exploring a possible deal with Sabre Travel Network, according to Sabre’s Senior Vice President for Marketing and Strategy Wade Jones.
“We’ve had conversations with Airbnb, and we think there’s an opportunity to help them get further into the business and corporate travel market,” the executive told The Memo. “Their business model is very different to ours, but we want to have as much ‘content’ in our network as we can.”
Reports said that collaboration could mean Airbnb gets much more exposure to corporate travelers than it does now, gaining access to companies on the Sabre network. It would be a big boost for Airbnb to increase its share of the corporate travel space, worth $1.2 trillion, reports added.
Airbnb has already made efforts to strengthen its presence within the corporate travel market by launching its Business Travel program in 2015. Some of the most recent data, released by T&E firm Concur earlier this year, found that Airbnb bookings among its corporate clients jumped by 61 percent in the U.K. between Q3 2014 and Q2 2016.
Last year Airbnb struck a deal with American Express Global Business Travel, which sees Amex GBT referring its corporate travelers to Airbnb services, with plans to streamline expense reporting.
At present, Airbnb remains most popular with individual consumers, with corporate bookings making up just a tenth of total bookings on the platform, according to reports.
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