“When have you had a better work experience than when you’re out on a business trip working from your hotel?”
There was a time when the term “digital nomad” and “remote work” carried their own connotations. Not only were they rare, but the jobs were almost always associated with 20-something techies who spent their time with their laptops on a beach.
The pandemic changed all that.
Most of us experienced remote working in some capacity and some of us exited the pandemic as digital nomads ourselves. According to researchers, the typical profile of a digital nomad is shifting. Island-hopping 20-somethings are being joined by employees in their 30s and 40s, as well as executives and those in management.
The latter segments happen to be the preferred target market for Benjamin Assuied (CEO and co-founder) and his team at Worklounge. No stranger to hospitality and the challenges faced by hotels, Benjamin realised that the lack in executive lounge occupancy could be solved by the increasing number of remote professionals in a post-pandemic landscape.
In 2021, Worklounge launched a premium membership app, giving remote professionals access to luxury lounges at InterContinental, Anantara, Sofitel, and many other hotels across Thailand. Its plug-and-play app allows the upper tier of remote professionals to book a lounge, on-demand, wherever and whenever they need it – for meetings, important document handovers and signings, or discussions in a setting that’s exclusive and more private than a regular coworking hub.
WiT caught up with Benjamin to chat about work-life-travel trends continuing to change, going from B2C to B2B, and why a young company like Worklounge has its work cut out for it.
Q: Was Worklounge a pandemic idea or was this something you had in mind as coworking spaces were becoming popular a few years ago?
When the pandemic hit [my co-founder Riku Pentinen and I] both said, you know what’s funny about the remote working industry? Every other player is trying to duplicate some form of WeWork by targeting the same customer profile, trying to poach the customers from WeWork, and everybody puts a little twist – maybe they’ll add an extra yoga studio or maybe they have a vegan restaurant, but in the end it’s just the exact same chairs, same quality furniture, and nobody has created a multi-location, single priced ultra-high end workspace solution.
You didn’t have the “WeWork” for people in Armani suits that still want to be in an environment with other executives to enjoy five-star hospitality service.
Think about how much underutilized space is in five star hotels, particularly the executive lounge. Some get busy for the breakfast rush, and then some get busy for cocktail hour, but in between, most executive lounges are completely dead except for a few in-house guests, who are using it as an office space. That’s when we thought of Worklounge to create a network of office solutions that could be used as a predictable and consistent service for modern executives.
Q: As more people are travelling and staying in hotels, what happens if the lounges are too busy or taken up?
For the Marriotts and the Hiltons, it’s true that the executive lounges are typically very crowded. For other hotels, you would be surprised to see how much vacancy is available in those spaces. The one thing that we tell hotels is we can be flexible with the number of hours they open the lounge to our members, the member benefits that they offer, and the amount of coffee that’s complementary. We’re able to work around the rush hours of the hotel.
The one thing we can’t compromise is access to a private space, which is defined as areas of the hotel that are reserved for in-house guests and VIPs. They can’t be common areas like lobbies, cafes, restaurants.
Also, we’ve already put into motion a sort of consultancy arm that’s going to help luxury hotels build their own workspace concepts. We want it to be loungey, we want the leather couches, we want the nice coffee tables. We still want it to be more about networking and hosting meetings.
So many conferences are going to stay on zoom. They’re expecting 30 – 40% of conference business to be lost forever. If that’s true, what if you have a nice corner unit with beautiful windows, nice views, and it’s just sitting empty for 330 days of the year… let’s build an executive lounge there!
Q: The hotel industry is fairly conservative, though. How do you overcome an obstacle like that?
There’s a multi-trillion dollar flexible office industry that is being created and I find it very hard to believe that the people who are absolutely best-suited to create the best work experiences are going to sit with their arms crossed and just watch it go by. Because let’s be honest, when have you ever had a better work experience than when you’re out on a business trip working from your hotel?
The hotel industry as a whole is a little bit conservative, it’s a little bit slow to respond, so it’s about being able to communicate this vision. Let’s target the right customer profile of high-earning executives and let’s bring them to your property. COVID really opened up a lot of minds and it allowed for people to think outside the box, but the second the borders reopened, 50% of that open mindedness was gone on day one. But, even if we have 30% left, that’s all I need to get myself in there and be able to sell the vision.
Q: In terms of monetisation, how are you splitting the Worklounge pie?
We pay the hotel on a per-visit basis. It’s free for them to join, we pay 100% of the customer acquisition cost. We target the right customer profile from top tier credit cards, top tier insurance customers, top tier airline loyalty members. We drive additional traffic to their property and once they’ve captured this customer at a $0.00 acquisition cost, we give them an opportunity to upsell the buffet and conference rooms… build their own relationship with that customer so that next time they host a ten-person conference or business lunch, they just think about that hotel.
And we genuinely care about creating a win, win, win situation. For less than a WeWork membership in Thailand, we have more workspaces than a WeWork or a Regis. We have over 25 locations, we’re only a year old.
We don’t ask the hotels for commissions because we want to pass as much of the benefits to the members. It’s really about creating the largest network possible. I know that our customer acquisition cost is around $20 – $25, so we’re paying that and then driving the customers to the hotel. We also have an amazing business development team that has closed deals with local banks, credit cards, shopping malls, international insurance companies, airlines and so these hotels are now getting free marketing exposure from these loyalty program ecosystems.
Q: Are most of your customers individuals or is this more B2B?
We started out as a B2C, but the customer acquisition cost for B2C is incredibly high. So, we pivoted to B2B2C, where we want to position ourselves as the progression of a priority pass benefit for your American Express Platinum, Chase Sapphire, Citibank Premium, etcetera. We want to tap into this huge loyalty program industry.
A lot of people don’t really recognize what it is. So, we need to do another small pivot and really go hard to the B2Bs, so that the people writing the checks are making the decisions. We’re going to have direct contact with them and [get important feedback].
That gives us much faster responsiveness than working with somebody who’s doing these partnerships on behalf of their members and then somewhere along the way losing the message and not having that direct touchpoint with the customers.
Q: If a member wants to host a meeting in an executive lounge, how many guests do they get to bring along, if at all?
We’re realizing that’s definitely something that needs to be added. A plus one is almost mandatory. Obviously, when you’re a startup from a technology standpoint, there’s what you’d like to do and then there’s what you can do with the budget that you have.
Right now, we’ve communicated with our hotels that if somebody comes in, they have a plus one [by default]. Just scan their QR code twice and we’ll pay you. We want to do a plus one for free, and then if it’s a $25 day pass, to give it for $15 which is almost all of the money we pay to the hotel… so we’re more than happy to break even. We’re not able to communicate this and neither will we ever communicate this, but it’s important to recognize the value of the real estate you’re getting when you’re getting into a five-star executive lounge.
Q: What’s your target for 2023, in terms of members and hitting certain milestones in terms of the number of clients on Worklounge?
We don’t need to do critical mass. I’d much rather be a company with 25,000 solid members, rather than getting too big. Incremental growth of the right customer profile. We don’t need to send 50 people a day to the hotels: they’ll be happy with 10 or 15 of the right customers. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality and you have to be mindful of that because our business model allows us to be a very healthy company without needing 5,000,000 people in our network.
We break even at pretty much 400 monthly recurring members and we’re over $1,000,000 in MRR with just 4400 members. 4400 Members in Southeast Asia between Bangkok, KL, Singapore, Jakarta, maybe Bali – that’s what we’re striving for in 2023, to reach that magic 4500 monthly memberships in the top destinations in Southeast Asia.
Q: I think I know the answer but, what’s standing between you and getting to those ambitious numbers in Southeast Asian hotspots?
Very easy answer – money! We need capital, we need money. We know people want it. We are having conversations with some of the largest hotel groups in the world. They love the idea. We’re flexible, they’re flexible. We’d be more than happy to make the $25,000 investment for the right furniture.
I’ve got hotels without executive lounges saying, Benjamin, please let me build a workspace for you guys. But we’re not ready for that yet. We need some firepower, build the team, improve the tech, et cetera.
The difference with the Southeast Asian and American perspectives on investment is that in America you can make 99 bad investments, but if you hit that one home run, you’re still a hero. The risk-taking levels there are on another planet. In Southeast Asia, you avoid making mistakes as much as possible.
We’ve got lounges in Vietnam, Cambodia, all over Thailand, corporate partnerships, the functioning technology – we did all of that for only $150,000. And still the expectations are… well what’s your MRR, what’s your downloads, what’s your this, what’s your that. We’ve built the network; we need some fuel to really get the rocket ship going and so that’s the one thing holding us back.
Q: Where to next for Worklounge? Southeast Asia has some of the fanciest hotels, can we expect to see Worklounge in some new spots?
Once we get the money, strategically the next market that makes the most sense is Vietnam because of the number of cities that we can open in. One marketing dollar can go a lot further in Vietnam. Then, KL and maybe Jakarta, and the grand finale would be in Singapore. It may sound counterintuitive because our best customer profile is going to be concentrated in Singapore. But Singapore is a bit more demanding in terms of the quality of the tech you’ve already built.
Don’t come to Singapore without being refined and prepared to operate at the highest level. The expectations are a lot higher and the leeway for forgiveness is a lot smaller. So, we want to come there when we feel like we’re 100% ready. If we were in San Francisco, New York, Paris, London – Singapore holds itself to those high standards and we want to show up ready to meet those expectations.
