Pandemic-weary travelers eager to use new flexible office work schedules to take longer trips are fueling record spikes in nightly bookings and revenue for Airbnb, the home-sharing platform that expects further growth as the pandemic shows signs of easing.

The San Francisco company said the beginnings of a travel recovery in 2021 have fully taken root this year to push its bookings beyond pre-pandemic levels. Airbnb said travelers are booking more than at any point in the tech company's 14-year history thanks to pent-up demand and an ability to be away from a single office for weeks at a stretch or longer. Even with remaining pandemic concerns and macroeconomic headwinds, its guests are staying for greater stretches as they visit densely populated urban areas they have largely avoided for the past two years.

Airbnb said gross nights booked grew 32% in this year's first quarter from the same time in 2019. By the end of April, it had 30% more nights booked for the summer travel season than in the same time before the pandemic. Gross nights booked for cross-border travel more than tripled from the first quarter last year as more workers stretch the geographic limits of non-office flexibility.

In a sign of travelers leveraging their newfound work flexibility, long-term stays of 28 days or more have become the company's fastest growing category by trip length compared to 2019. Airbnb customers more than doubled the number of longer-term stays they book on the platform compared to before the pandemic. Long-term stays accounted for more than 20% of the gross nights booked on the platform through the first quarter. The trends have the potential to lead to less demand for both the office property and hotel markets.

"For millions of people, they don’t have to go back to an office five days a week, and the vast majority of companies are not requiring employees to go back to an office,” CEO Brian Chesky said on a call Tuesday with investors. “We are going to continue to see continued and sustained growth for stays of longer than a month and stays of longer than a week."

An eagerness to return to normalcy has strengthened demand for leisure and business travel across the hospitality sector. Annual occupancy rates among U.S. hotels nearly hit 60% by year-end 2021, according to data from CoStar hospitality analytics firm STR, about 20% higher than in 2020.

The company reported a 70% year-over-year jump in first quarter revenue to $1.5 billion and an 80% jump compared to the same time in 2019. Airbnb's losses — typical of many young Silicon Valley businesses — narrowed from $1.2 billion in early 2021 to $19 million by the end of the first quarter this year.

Airbnb reported more than 100 million bookings during the first quarter of this year, a record for the company that underscores a rebound made possible thanks to myriad cost-cutting measures and the tech giant's focus on capturing business from remote workers.

As large employers formalize their return-to-office plans, many are now offering staff the chance to work from home, transfer to another location, or in some extreme cases, never step foot in the office again.

The newfound flexibility has given employees the ability to live more nomadically, and while it has disrupted the national office market's recovery, Airbnb has leveraged it to pull the company out of its own pandemic-era slump.

At its lowest point in 2020, Airbnb reported $335 million in revenue in the second quarter of 2020, a 72% drop compared to the same time a year earlier. It rebounded quickly in the second half of the year, and the company reported revenue of more than $1.34 billion in the third quarter and $859 million for the fourth quarter. All told, Airbnb's full-year revenue for 2020 was almost $3.4 billion, a 30% decline from 2019.

Airbnb has since used some of that pandemic-related disruption for growth, betting its "live anywhere" strategy will position it to cater to the redistribution of where people travel, work and live.

The company itself is embracing the shift, and in late April told employees they wouldn't ever have to return to an office if they didn't so choose. Instead, Airbnb's "Work From Anywhere" policy will allow a majority of the company's 6,000-person workforce — about half of whom are based in the United States — to move anywhere within their home country without changes to their compensation, according to the policy.

Employees should expect to meet in person each quarter for about a week, and starting in September, workers will be able to live and work anywhere in the world for up to 90 days each year.

"In the last two years, we navigated the pandemic, rebuilt the company from the ground up, went public, upgraded our entire service and reported record earnings, all while working remotely," Chesky told employees in a blog post outlining the company's flexible-work future. "It’s clear that flexibility works for Airbnb."