Skift Take
With more luxury and lifestyle hotels offering co-working spaces, is now the time to grade the remote work experience with star ratings?
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As Accor continues to stamp its Wojo co-working brand across all its properties, it can expect more competition from other hotel brands that are starting to offer their own premium spaces.
A growing number of startups are also looking to fill the gap by “activating” these spaces in top-end hotels — a potential signal this particular area of hospitality is fast maturing.
Worklounge, for example, is a flexible workspace startup that offers subscriptions to high quality business, executive and club lounges in four- and five-star hotels. These areas in theory can offer a more relaxed working atmosphere, particularly if they provide hotel comforts and reflect the hotel's design, rather than typically efficient co-working spaces that focus on desks, cubicles and sound-proofed booths. In Thailand, it already plugs into brands like InterContinental and Sofitel.
“Quite a few traditional hotel companies were trying to catch up by developing some kind of work-from-hotel concept,” said Riku Penttinen, its co-founder.
“In early 2020 I was receiving requests from hotel companies and operators that wanted to open a flexible workspace.," Penttinen said. "That was the lightbulb moment for us — there are so many underutilized spaces in upscale hotels. If we could find a way to activate this inventory, in a way that would benefit both the hotel and the end user, we’d be on to something big.”
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Krow is another new subscription service, offering premium locations in Portugal, and it targets restaura