Berlin, 31 January 2017 –
Meeting rooms are often stepchild of hospitality: In many hotels, any attempt to realise a modern interior design ends on the doorstep of the meeting facilities. In comparison, cool lofts in city centre locations appear funny and inspiring. The Berlin start-up Spacebase takes advantage of this effect and the quite more attractive offer and develops the “AirBnB for meeting rooms“. The hospitality sector for business travels once again finds itself confronted with an enormous competition.
Hotel operators, who are still reluctant to online quick-bookings of standard meeting rooms via tools like Expedia Meeting Market or niche suppliers like Okanda, will be further left behind. After Living Lobbies, hotel operators now have to increasingly deal with „Living MICE“- concepts. With the start of Spacebase, it is more important than ever to counteract the image of boring and deliberately inelegant business hotels. The pressure on hotels increases again.
The fresh appearance of the Spacebase lofts is impressive. It remains to be seen how quick meeting decision-makers of the clients will accept the new booking service. According to the German newspaper FAZ, the portal could build up a portfolio of already 2,000 conference spaces in 30 cities in Europe and the USA in only two years time. There are 14 employees at the Berlin headquarters right now. The Swedish travel operator and investor Stephan Ekbergh invested in the seven-digit range.
This new initiative shows that hesitant actions can become seriously dangerous for established business models in this ever more faster world of digitalisation. The German hotel sector sees itself once again confronted with a revolutionary development: To face this challenge, there is a strong need to deal with pioneers and IT-visionaries in a collaborative think tank, including innovative booking tools and the digital optimisation of all business and work processes. This dsituation requires lateral thinkers, like „Chief Hotel Revolutionary“ Marco Nussbaum (Prizeotel).