The Five Star Hotel Lobby Is Now Your Coworking Space, and It Is Winning

There is a particular table in a particular lobby in this city that has, on any given Tuesday morning, more active series A founders sitting at it than any of the branded coworking spaces within a two kilometre radius. The hotel does not advertise the table. The founders do not coordinate. The table is, somehow, always full, and the wait staff have learned to bring the second espresso without being asked because the first one was, by the calibrated reading of the room, going to be insufficient.

We have, as a category, discovered that we never actually wanted coworking. We wanted a lobby with good coffee, comfortable seating, intermittent eye contact with people we knew vaguely, and the social cover of being somewhere expensive enough that the meeting we were having clearly mattered.

What the lobby actually provides

It provides the things coworking promised and never delivered. Quiet enough to think. Loud enough that a difficult conversation does not echo. Furniture designed for people whose work involves sitting for three hours and then leaving. A bathroom of a quality that the same demographic, in their twenties, would have considered aspirational, and which they now consider table stakes. And, crucially, a coffee bill that the founder can charge to the company without anyone in finance flinching, because the line item reads investor meeting.

Coworking, by comparison, was a category that tried to provide community as a substitute for atmosphere. The community was largely synthetic, the atmosphere was determined by a procurement decision made twelve months earlier, and the price was high enough that the founder was always aware of it. The lobby, charging seventy dirhams for an espresso flight, somehow felt cheaper.

What the hotels are doing about it

The smarter hotels have noticed. They have, very deliberately, added more outlets at the lobby tables, upgraded the wifi, instructed the staff not to interrupt meetings that look serious, and quietly introduced a category of all-day pricing for the regulars that nobody talks about publicly. The pricing is, on a per-hour basis, more than coworking would charge. It includes things coworking cannot include, like the credibility of being there.

The less smart hotels have noticed too, and have started trying to charge for the table, which is the move that immediately drives the founder population to the next lobby down the avenue. The hotels that figure out how to keep the table free while monetising everything around it are, in operational terms, running one of the more profitable side businesses in regional hospitality. The hotels that have not figured this out are losing a customer segment they do not, in their internal accounting, know they are losing.

What this means for the actual coworking sector

The actual coworking sector is, in this region, in a quieter version of the structural retrenchment that the same sector is going through globally. The flagship spaces are still busy, with a younger demographic doing the kind of work that benefits from the community layer. The mid-tier spaces are increasingly empty during the hours when the founders used to fill them. The senior population has moved to the lobby. They are not coming back unless the coworking sector figures out how to provide a lobby of its own, which is, in operational terms, exactly what the better hospitality groups are already doing more cheaply.

The next interesting move, in our reading, will be a hospitality group acquiring a coworking brand and quietly reorganising the underlying real estate to look more like a series of lobbies than a series of desks. Whoever does this first will be the one writing the next chapter of the category. The category itself will, by then, no longer be called coworking. It will be called, with appropriate vagueness, the working day.