Work.Life now generates in one week external meeting room revenue that used to take a month.
That was one of the stats shared on Monday 9 November at The Dynamic Pricing Playbook, our latest Brave Ideas afternoon for flex and coworking leaders.
We opened with a debrief on the themes from this year’s Coworking Europe.
I sat down with Katie Davies, Meetings & Events Lead at Work.Life, for a candid, data-backed fireside chat. Work.Life is a Flexspace AI client, and David Song, CMO of Flexspace AI, chimed in to add context and answer questions.
From yield management to dynamic pricing
Before turning to Katie, I shared why I’ve been tracking the dynamic pricing topic so closely.
In 2014, (in a previous life), I was on stage in NYC talking about yield management tactics and changing prices for different days of the week and different times, based on demand.
In 2024, I was back in NYC for a GWA event and met Eyal Lasker, CEO of Flexspace AI, who shared he was bringing an ecommerce platform with dynamic pricing to the coworking industry. My reaction was simple: our industry needs this. Finally, we had sophisticated technology to do what I’d been saying we should do all along.
When Flexspace AI announced it was coming to the UK, with Work.Life as its first UK client, I wanted to partner with them and their clients to track the data.
Does it actually work?
What works, what doesn’t, what evolves, and what impact does it have on the business?
Work.Life and Clockwise were the two big clients I started following. That’s why I planned this event: to show what’s actually working, and how other operators can use it to improve their businesses.
James Panepinto, Group Ancillary Revenue Manager at Clockwise has kindly shared these stats:
Meeting room revenue up 22.9%, from 13.2% more bookings at an average booking value about 8.6% higher
Meeting room utilisation up from 33.6% to 39.3%
Around one in six occupied meeting room hours came through Flexspace AI
Across the wider platform, revenue up 21% and orders up 14.8%
Growth at 13 of its 18 trading locations
Meeting rooms delivered 71% of the revenue growth booked via Flexspace AI
Plenty of what was shared stays in the room.
But here are five themes we’re taking into 2027.
5 themes we’re taking into 2027
1. Give variable income an owner
Average UK meeting room utilisation at around 18%.
Hotels have priced rooms to demand for decades, and coworking operators are now bringing the same discipline to meeting rooms and day passes.
Work.Life’s biggest lesson was giving one person ownership of variable income. Katie came from restaurants and events, where filling every seat is the job. She is now the heaviest user on the Flexspace AI platform.
The gains came from small, frequent moves, a few pounds here and a few percent there, tested room by room. Her advice: be a bit brave, and test.
2. Price by location, room and day
Portfolio averages hide the detail. At busy member locations such as Soho, Work.Life holds back what it sells externally so members can still get a room. In quiet weeks, like summer and half terms, it pushes demand in.
David added a counterintuitive point. As member occupancy climbs, non-member meeting room revenue can fall, simply because there is less inventory to sell. Pricing has to move to offset it.
One simple change to how Work.Life presented its locations online lifted some sites by around 20%, without losing revenue anywhere else. The room heard exactly what it was.
3. Time discounts to win new customers
Work.Life uses discounts at specific moments, when demand is naturally low. A 50% offer over the summer, when utilisation dips, filled space that would otherwise have sat empty. Of those bookings, 77% came from new customers, and some have booked again since.
The same play helped launch the new Victoria location. It brought in revenue and gave the sales team warm leads to tour while the private offices were still being let.
Do members spot the offer and ask for the same deal?
Katie’s answer: No, because they get better discounts through our meeting room packages that we offer exclusively to our members
4. Treat the booking engine as a marketing channel
Work.Life already had traffic coming to its website. The challenge was converting it, and online booking delivered results almost straight away.
According to David, only around 3% of website traffic goes on to book a room or a tour. The other 97% is where the opportunity sits.
Getting visitors into a booking flow captures data that can be remarketed through paid social and display. One operator was surprised to find its website pulling in far more search traffic once it could take bookings online.
Buyer behaviour is shifting too. In David’s view, even enterprise customers increasingly want to self-serve, and he shared the example of a large multi-day event booked entirely online, without a single conversation.
5. Look past the first booking
Work.Life’s repeat booking rate is now around 35%, up from about 17% a year ago.
The next focus is turning more of those bookers into members. Work.Life has also seen members who cancelled keep booking on demand, so the relationship outlasts the membership.
Join us next time
Two things stayed with the people at the table:
The online change that lifted some Work.Life sites by around 20%
The competitor whose presence moves local pricing most.
Places at Brave Ideas events are limited and attendance is curated.
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Thank you to Flexspace AI and NORNORM for making the afternoon possible, and to the Work.Life team for hosting us at St Cross Street. Thank you to Katie and David for being so open with their numbers, and to everyone who took a seat at the table.
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