Airbnb is continuing its expansion of business-related offerings. In 2018, the short-term lodging and home-sharing company announced Airbnb for Events, and last month it announced that it had acquired Gaest.com, a Denmark-based online marketplace for venue listings. Pronounced “guest,” the site allows users to find and book meeting space exactly the way they would search for and book accommodations through Airbnb.com but with additional filters for the number of attendees and required meeting equipment such as projectors or whiteboards, and what catering options are available. One of the most interesting features on the Gaest site, that differentiates it from similar services like Spacebase and Breather, is a carbon footprint metric for each venue in the form of the average grams of CO2 released in one hour for the maximum number of attendees at that venue. For meeting planners searching for sustainable venues or required to report on sustainability, this is a useful piece of information to have upfront.
Currently, Gaest listings are limited to Mexico, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, and several cities in Denmark. There are roughly 3,000 venues listed on the site and as well as hotel ballrooms and coworking spaces with executive boardrooms; the site seems to specialize in unique spaces for meeting planners looking for an intriguing off-site dinner or VIP location, such as a sailing ship for a group of 40 in Oslo or the historic Gladstone Library in London for a reception for 350.
