Virtual work, school may alter future travel
Airbnb stays growing longer during pandemic
Brian Chesky, CEO and co-founder of Airbnb, believes that the line between travel and daily life is becoming permanently blurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic that continues to sweep the globe.
People are starting to stay longer at Airbnb locations, rather than opting for a quick getaway, making travel less of a feature and more of a way of life. “As length of stay increases, those two worlds start blurring together,” Chesky told USA TODAY.
In a letter published last month that accompanied Airbnb’s 2021 travel report, titled “2021 Will Be the Year of Meaningful Travel,” Chesky said that he believes the biggest trend the travel industry will see is the tendency of travelers to prioritize “meaningful travel.”
“We asked people, and they told us that ‘meaningful travel’ is meaningful time with the people they care about,” Chesky said. “Typically, their family first and foremost, then their friends – really people they’ve felt disconnected from, isolated from and they’ve missed over the last year.”
Forty-one percent of travelers surveyed said that connecting with family and friends will be “much more important” post-pandemic.
Mass travel, he says in the report’s foreword, is really just another form of isolation as the traveler becomes one anonymous figure amid a huge herd.
A year into the pandemic, the way that people are traveling has already changed, Chesky noted. People don’t want to be among the herd.
“I think because people were traveling nearby – the places they were going – many of them didn’t even have hotels. They’re traveling and staying longer because they’re more flexible.”
Airbnb longer stays on the rise
“I think we’re evolving from our original roots of short-term to really including monthly stays.” Brian Chesky CEO and co-founder of Airbnb
Airbnb started as a short-term rental platform, and it remains one – to a degree. But Chesky said that’s starting to change.
“I think we’re evolving from our original roots of short-term to really including monthly stays,” Chesky said.
There aren’t many people booking “permanent” or “annual stays” right now, Chesky said.
But one of Airbnb’s “largest segments” is monthly rentals.
“Fewer people are choosing to just live permanently in one location,” Chesky said, noting that he believes
this trend actually began before COVID-19 hit, but is accelerating as a result of the shift in habits with an upward trend of remote work options.
The flexibility that comes with remote work and learning is also changing when people travel, according to Airbnb’s 2021 travel report.
“A significant percentage of Americans are more open to traveling during off-peak times of year and days of the week – one-quarter of those surveyed, in both cases,” Airbnb said.
Another 24% of respondents “see themselves undertaking more longerterm stays.”
Because disclosure rules require publicly traded companies to share information that could impact the company or investors at one time rather than in pieces, Airbnb, which went public in December, couldn’t share specific booking data. But the company did release statistics in November stating that 60% of longer-term stays were by guests who worked or studied while at their rentals.
In its 2021 travel report, Airbnb noted that during the third quarter of 2020, it saw more stays of 28 nights or longer than during the same period the year before.
‘Flexications’ and other pandemic-induced travel habits
The travel trends put forth for 2021 by Airbnb are mirrored by competitors including vacation rental platform Vrbo, which released its own January report that focuses on how “pandemic-influenced travel habits are here to stay” – that includes mixing work and travel for what Vrbo deems a “flexication.”
In their survey, Vrbo found that 52% of travelers who took a “flexication” (its term for a trip mixing work and pleasure) in 2020 “found the experience of blending work and family vacation time refreshing.”
The “where” part of the equation is changing along with the how: According to Vrbo, many families are choosing to take trips closer to home, including road trips, which is in line with what Chesky and Airbnb observed.
Cincinnati: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says only 70% of COVID-19 vaccine doses distributed to Ohio have gone into arms. But state officials say the CDC data doesn’t take into account the more than 200,000-dose “bank” of vaccines for long-term care facilities that are actually stored in a Pfizer warehouse in Michigan. Dan Tierney, spokesperson for Gov. Mike DeWine, said the inclusion of the stockpile in CDC data makes it seem as if many doses are sitting unused on shelves when, in reality, Ohio providers have been administering 92%-93% of vaccines they have by the end of the week.