Ask most operators what their meeting room utilization is, and you will get a confident number. Ask Eyal Laskar, founder and CEO of Flexspace.ai, what actually happens when you check that number against the data, and you will usually get a much lower one.
That gap, between what operators assume and what is actually happening in their booking calendar, is the subject of the latest episode of the Everything Coworking podcast, “How to Maximize Meeting Room Revenue in Your Coworking Space,” the fourth in this summer’s series on adding revenue to your coworking business. If you missed the first three, catch up here: where that 30 to 40% actually comes from, part-time private offices, and virtual mail revenue. This one builds directly on all three.
I wanted to bring Eyal on because he lives inside that 30 to 40% every day. Before Flexspace.ai, he spent years at WeWork trying to figure out how to sell space the way Uber sells rides. He has been thinking about on-demand space since 2018, which either makes him an industry veteran or a man who needs a new hobby. He would probably tell you it is both.
This article is the written companion to that conversation. It covers what makes meeting rooms and day offices into real e-commerce products instead of an afterthought, the data behind pricing and utilization, and why your website might be losing you bookings you never even see.
Stop chasing tours. Get paid for them instead.
Most operators are still running the same playbook: get someone to book a tour, walk them through the space, hope the good vibes close the deal. Eyal’s point is that this is backward. If your meeting rooms, day passes, and day offices are set up as actual e-commerce products, people pay you to come see your space in the first place.
Think about what that does to your funnel. Instead of spending marketing dollars to drag someone through the door, someone searching for a meeting room finds you, books it, and pays before they ever walk in. You are not funding the visit. They are. And once they are physically standing in your space, you have an active lead who is already spending money on your meeting rooms and may need coworking or office space next.
This works especially well with your local community, the people who might come back next month, not the traveler grabbing a single touchdown meeting on their way through town. Know the difference between those two segments before you build your on-demand strategy around either one.
Your meeting rooms are sitting empty more than you think
Eyal asks every operator the same question before working with them: what do you think your meeting room utilization actually is? Most guess high. Most are wrong.
Thirty percent, across members and non-members combined, is considered strong. Fifty percent is the number to aspire to, not the number to expect on day one. If that sounds low, sit with it for a minute, because it means most operators have a room that could be generating real revenue and instead sits empty most of the time.
That is also the argument against pricing your meeting rooms too cheaply for your own members. If members can book the room for next to nothing, they will use it constantly, and that eats up the very capacity you need to sell to non-members at full price. Low utilization is your opportunity here. Do not let your own members absorb it for free.
People book same day far more than you would guess
One of the more useful numbers from this conversation: roughly 30% of meeting room bookings happen the same day. Someone wakes up, realizes they need a room, and books it within hours. That number climbs even higher for day passes, into the 70 to 80% range.
The bigger the room, the more advance notice people give you. Rooms built for six to fifteen people tend to get booked seven to fourteen days out, because bigger meetings need more planning. But the small rooms, the ones built for a quick call or an interview, get booked the morning of, constantly.
If your booking platform requires 24 hours notice because it feels operationally safer, you are simply never seeing that demand. It does not show up as a lost sale in your reporting. It just never happens.
Price and volume move together, but not the way you would guess
Eyal’s team ran the numbers on what happens when operators raise meeting room prices. Across the board, volume dropped, which is exactly what you would expect. But only the operators who raised prices by more than 10% ended up with more total revenue. Everyone who raised prices by less than that lost volume without gaining enough per booking to make up for it. Revenue went down.
The elasticity ratio they found is roughly one to three. Drop your price by 1%, and you can expect about 3% more booking volume. That is not a reason to panic-discount your rooms. It is a reason to know your numbers before you touch a price, because a five dollar bump on a $35 hourly room is a bigger swing than it feels like, and guessing your way through pricing is how you accidentally lose money while feeling like you are being smart about it.
The same logic applies to blanket discounting slow days. Cutting prices across the board on Mondays and Fridays sounds reasonable until you look closer and realize demand spikes on specific weeks for reasons that have nothing to do with the day of the week. Without the data, you are not making a pricing decision. You are guessing, and calling it a strategy.
Your photos are doing more work than you think, and probably working against you
If your meeting room listing has a photo that looks like it was taken on a phone in a hurry, or worse, a stock photo, you are losing bookings you will never hear about. People book based on what they see, and a generic photo signals a generic experience before anyone sets foot in your space.
This is the same lesson Airbnb learned early on: professional photography was one of the biggest levers they found for converting bookings, more than almost anything else they tried. Treat your meeting rooms and day offices with the same seriousness you would give your best office suite. That means real photography, not a phone snapshot between meetings, and an accurate listing. A four-person room needs a table that fits four laptops. An eight-person room needs eight chairs. It sounds obvious until you start looking at what is actually posted.
The surprising bookings: dance studios and content creators
Ask Eyal what has surprised him most about who books through an on-demand platform, and dance studios come up immediately. A studio with a gap between classes can list that window and fill it with workshops or recurring rentals. TikTok creators are booking space for content shoots. Event space, in particular, is picking up, and it carries a bigger ticket size than meeting rooms, often after hours, which means you are monetizing time your building was previously just sitting there costing you rent.
None of this requires your buyer to walk the space first. If the photos are good and the listing answers the obvious questions, someone planning a birthday party or a workshop can book the whole thing in one sitting instead of trading emails back and forth for a week and a half.
Run this like its own business, because it is one
The through line across all four of these articles is the same: workspace revenue is the majority of your business, but it is not the whole business, and treating meeting rooms, events, and mail as a real product line with its own goals, its own tracking, and its own P&L is what separates operators who hit strong margins from operators who leave money on the table without ever noticing it is missing.
Eyal put it well: once the technology and the product are actually built out, this becomes a flywheel that works around the clock without you having to think about it daily. But someone on your team still has to set the target, build the product, and check the numbers. It does not run itself into existence. It runs itself once you have already done the work.
For the full conversation with Eyal Laskar, including more on retargeting website visitors and turning first-time bookers into repeat customers, listen to the full episode of the Everything Coworking podcast.
