Workspace management supplier LiquidSpace is targeting the corporate market with the promise of a booking solution for small, single-day, short-term meetings, requiring no requests for proposals or contracts. The nearly four-year-old San Francisco-based tech firm claims "brandwide" deals with Marriott International and Hilton Hotels Corp. and corporate deals with clients including Accenture, Autodesk and investor Steelcase. Overall, its database includes hundreds of hotels and other meeting spaces.
LiquidSpace enables users to book space—traditional meeting rooms or alternative spaces at hotels and other venues—on demand through traditional online and mobile channels, LiquidSpace president and COO Doug Marinaro recently told BTN. Once booked, that space is reserved for the user, who can invite other participants. If a space is booked at the hotel-set price (as opposed to some spaces, like hotel lobby workstations, for example, that carry no charge), an email is sent to the venue alerting it to the booking, along with any ancillary services ordered, potentially including Wi-Fi access and food and beverage service.
LiquidSpace takes half of the listed cost for a first-time booking and declining percentages thereafter, Marinaro said.
"We're solving a different problem that the Cvents and the StarCites and the catering systems are all meant to solve, which is that our sweet spot is a meeting anywhere from two people up to 25 people, [held in a single] day," Marinaro said.
For those events, he said, hotels have an interest in making available in the very short term the meeting space they typically reserve for longer-term, larger events. "We're addressing that inventory that has this diminishing return as time passes," Marinaro explained. "Once the time has passed, it's gone away. There's no value there."
Hotels, though, typically restrict availability of that meeting space to events booked within 30 days, Marinaro said. They'll also often require a booking window of at least a few hours.
"What's interesting is that actually our lead time for meetings sometimes is negative, in the sense that we're standing outside the hotel and I want that meeting room now—I'm going to book it, and I'm going to walk in," Marinaro said. "So the hotel can say, 'I need a minimum of two hours to make sure that our quality of our brand is represented well.' On the flip side, they can also set an outside booking window that [allows] no bookings [further] than 30 days out."
Hotels and other venues that choose to make inventory available in LiquidSpace can do so in less than an hour, Marinaro said.
"They're asked to go through and describe their property, put in the hours of operation, describe the spaces that they want to put on and upload the photographs," he said. "That's the start of the process, then we reach out to every property and we vet them; we make sure that they're actually a real property. We get them trained on this real-time brand promise and what it means to actually deliver that, because it's a digital/physical experience."
Comparing the training process of a LiquidSpace venue to that of ground transportation network Uber's training of chauffeurs or Airbnb's training of homeowners, Marinaro said the company offers assistance in ensuring meeting spaces are attractively displayed in the platform.
"The technical uploading and setting up of the venue is very simple," he said. "We actually even send out photographers for various locations, to go through and make sure that the photographs are awesome. It's more of a problem with business centers than hotels, but sometimes even with hotels, they'll just go ahead and pull some stock photograph of a room. They don't take great photos of meeting rooms. We'll bring in someone who can really make that room look awesome. And then they're up and running."
Spaces listed in LiquidSpace can't be double-booked, Marinaro said, because the company essentially functions as the property management system for spaces made available by participating hotels. "If the hotel's not willing to let us be that, then we're not in that hotel," he said. "There is no double-booking. There is none of that conflict because we are the property management system for those meeting rooms. We give that to the hotels. We say, 'You don't have a property management system for short-term use of your meeting rooms. We're going to give you one for free.' "
LiquidSpace collects the fee the hotel sets and retains half of a user's first booking of a given space. That fee declines to 25 percent of a second booking through LiquidSpace of that space—"you come back a second time, we figure they've earned your attention," Marinaro said—and 10 percent of any subsequent booking.
Meetings reservations are not the extent of LiquidSpace's proposition; the company cites inroads into workspace management and claims more than 16,000 corporate users. Marinaro pointed out it arranged its deal with Accenture through the consulting and professional services giant's real estate department, not its travel department.
"The world of where I work, not just where I meet, is changing to a world that's being serviced by hospitality, as opposed to being serviced by real estate," Marinaro said. "That is a huge opportunity. That's three billion meetings. That's why Marriott approached us. They wanted to be known not just as a place to sleep, but a place to work."
LiquidSpace since its 2010 founding has raised $12.2 million in four separate rounds of funding, according to CrunchBase. LiquidSpace identified investors that include Greylock Partners, Floodgate Fund, Shasta Ventures, GPT Group, CBRE and Steelcase.