This doesn't surprise me, although it's a trend I expect to be suppressed due to the pandemic. I've been working permanently remote for over half a decade now

This doesn't surprise me, although it's a trend I expect to be suppressed due to the pandemic. I've been working permanently remote for over half a decade now and these sorts of trips are common ways to create alignment and camaraderie. With a prior employer I visited Montenegro, Croatia, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland all as part of work to do large-scale planning exercises and team building. Usually we stayed in hotels because they would cut us a deal on room rates and provide conference spaces, but it was not uncommon to also have some or all staff staying in AirBnBs because we had a large enough team that many of the locales we visited didn't have a hotel that could accommodate all of us and it was more economical to use AirBnBs for the overflow rather than two different nearby hotels (from different chains). As an employee in this situation I preferred staying in the AirBnB to the hotel, since I prefer that style of living, having access to a kitchen, and the more "homey" feel, additionally it's nice being in a more residential area vs being in a more commercial area, especially in Europe where cities tend to be relatively walkable with good public transport. Also because AirBnBs were less expensive, it was easier to negotiate private accommodations vs sharing with a coworker. Generally I found these sorts of trips to be really high value and pretty much essential in a fully-remote company, to create the sorts of positive relationships with coworkers and camaraderie that help get through difficulties inherent to the work. Large-scale planning exercises also helped significantly with communicating alignment throughout the organization and training customer-facing functions on deeper intricacies of the product that they may not be exposed to daily.