Skift Take
Hoteliers will need to crack new metrics like desk occupancy, pricing plans and even social media credibility to help any co-working venture succeed.
Future of Work
As organizations start to embrace distributed work and virtual meetings, the corporate travel and meetings sectors are preparing for change. Read Skift’s ongoing coverage of this shift in business travel behavior through the lens of both brands and consumers.
It used to be about getting heads in beds, but more hotels are asking: what about heads on desks, and is providing co-working space a profitable business?
Fewer tourists are checking in due to global lockdowns, prompting hotels to look locally. In many cases, that's a market of growing numbers of remote or hybrid workers hunting for somewhere to escape their homes.
The bigger chains reacted quickly last year. Marriott and Hilton rolled out their own schemes, Work Anywhere with Marriott Bonvoy and Workspaces by Hilton, while in France Accor already had Wojo in place, and Best Western launched My WO. Now independent hotels and alliances are weighing up the idea.
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Europe’s Logis Hotels network, for example, is piloting a co-working program for 60 of its 2,300 sites. Rather than go it alone, it’s collaborating with GoWork&Co’s Hop’n Space (Hotel Office for Professional Nomad) brand. It aims to roll it out to most of its properties by 2023. This kind of collaboration could be the key to making it work. Not only do hotels compete with each other, they’re also competing with international household names like WeWork and IWG, currently on a mission to expand via franchising, as well as local co-working space providers. [caption id="attachment_441287" align="alignright" width="300"] A Best Wester