Online meetings booking platform MeetingsBooker.com has launched a new solution for its corporate clients to source workspaces, founder and CEO Ciaran Delaney told BTN. The option, being rolled out to clients now, is available alongside the company's traditional meeting booking solution.
"We're seeing meetings and work [space needs] converge now," Delaney said. "Bigger organizations are looking at their office footprint, their leases. And they're looking at our platform as a tool that allows people to book meeting spaces by the hour already. But what we also are doing with this new product is complementing that existing flexibility with the meeting space solution and allowing corporate clients to access the new products hotel clients are launching with relation to workspaces, and book day passes and book short-term office rentals."
Use cases have been varied, Delaney added, from clients saying they need a 20-person office for six weeks to others looking for a co-working space or day passes to hotels. "It's a rapidly emerging area," he said. "Nearly every week we are seeing hotels launch new products."
MeetingsBooker.com already works with many of the main providers of workspaces—including Breather, Convene, WorkSpace and Serendipity Labs—and it added the ability for hotels to add rooms as workspaces on its platform in April.
This new product does not mean that MeetingsBooker.com isn't still focused on the corporate meetings market. In fact, Delaney said he's seen a bigger focus on smaller meetings. "Covid-19 has shined a light on [small meetings] now, because big meetings aren't happening. We're seeing the focus before was about a solution to track spend for small meetings, whereas now it's all about tracking people, and knowing where people are in an organization. There's been an increased focus on digitalization and self-service technology for meetings and events."
In addition, this past summer MeetingsBooker.com relaunched its registration solution to allow for virtual or hybrid meetings, as well as attendee tracking. It also has a Covid-19 "Meet Safe" program in which venues add safety protocols to their profiles.
"That program has proven to be very successful," Delaney said. "It not only allows venues to add their policies around Covid safety, but it also allows users to search for spaces based on social distancing between attendees. Ninety percent of the bookings we now receive have people using that tool. We will be launching a new, expanded version of that early next year."
Delaney added that Covid has evolved the office concept, and organizations will have three environments where their employees will work and meet. "No. 1 will be their offices, which will probably be smaller," he said. "Two, they'll work from home. And what we offer is the third flexible option that allows people to access 150,000 spaces around the world when and how they want them, without sacrificing safety or control."
While meetings managers and corporate travel managers might not be the overseer of space used for work, Delaney said they've been introducing MeetingsBooker.com to their colleagues in departments such as human resources or to the property services category manager, "people who are in charge of office real estate for the organization," he said.
He added that during the 2019 Global Business Travel Association annual convention, he saw data that showed only 20 percent of travel managers had a solution in place to manage their simple meetings and events. "Next year, that can't be the case," he said. "Organizations will simply have to know where their employees are, and I think we'll see a rapid increase in adoption of simple meetings technology and a general trend toward self-service capabilities as well. It's amazing to see how Covid has driven change in behavior. Overnight, millions of people now work from home. I think we'll also see the workspace area really evolve."