Industry experts agree that among all the services provided by coworking spaces, meeting rooms are the most profitable by area, as well as the one with immense growth potential.
Coworking spaces typically provide meeting rooms as a part of their packages, which can accommodate anything from 20 to 80 people, and can be utilised to host meetings, trainings, and even seminars.
Dedicated coworking space meeting rooms are perfectly placed to generate maximum revenue and provide superior services by leveraging the following aspects of business logistics:
Offsite Meetings:
Meeting rooms are typically spacious halls with arrangements dedicated to hold dedicated meetings. As such, they are difficult to build and maintain in your own space since they draw significant resources but are rarely used. Thus, the corporate world, aiming to reduce operation costs, are slowly looking to outsource meeting rooms.
This is where the coworking spaces can play a significant role by providing dedicated meeting rooms to organise large scale meetings, seminars, as well as employee training events. This is profitable on both ends.
Increased Demand :
Meeting rooms have recently seen a spurt in demand. This has been attributed to various factors. For one, with the ever increasing need for skilled labour in the different sectors of the industry, the need to train new employees and retrain older ones on the latest technological developments have taken center stage in the agenda of most companies. Not to mention the requirement of regular internal board meetings of large scale organisations, and the various seminars and workshops on diverse topics commonly conducted these days fuelled by the relentless drive for education and innovation in the work culture and employee-management relationship.
Better than Hotels :
Statistics indicate that even with the higher than ever demand for meeting spaces, there is only about 30-40% occupancy reported in typical hired meeting rooms. There is also a demand for spaces that accomodate 20-40 people. This presents a lucrative opportunity for coworking spaces that provide meeting rooms for rent. These spaces are typically equipped with all the necessary infrastructure and services necessary to organise meetings. They are thus better options to go for over hotels while organising such events, as indicated by the following:
Hotels are built to allow more natural light in bedrooms, and meetings are relegated to alternative spaces like basements or expensive banquet halls. However, coworking spaces swear by well documented studies showing positive impact of natural light on employee productivity, and all their spaces are similarly designed.
Since hotel revenues are more from renting rooms & large catered events, they rarely pay similar attention to servicing meeting or conference rooms, especially when not in use. Coworking spaces that provide dedicated meeting room services are free from this anomaly, making the experience worthwhile for both the organiser and the attendees.
On a similar note, hotels rarely have support staff appropriate for business meetings. Coworking space meeting rooms, however, often provide dedicated secretarial services that come with the meeting room package. These services include recording the minutes of the meeting, printing and binding, etc.
Hotel rooms can be booked online, but booking for large events often needs multiple points of contact and many rounds of discussion. Coworking spaces offering meeting rooms for rent take this issue out of the picture by providing easy one click reservation of meeting rooms. Flexible packages ensure you can reserve a fixed number of seats for your events.
The above points thus make it clear that dedicated meeting rooms provided by coworking spaces are a far better option for your organisation than maintaining a meeting or conference room on your own premises. They are more economical, and supports the flexible workspace trend that appears to fuel employee productivity and well being in general.