BSI Hive #2 May 2008 - The Tin

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Avanta’s marketing director Chris Taylor agrees
that serviced offices are limited in the scale of
meetings they can handle: “The main distinction
is that hotels do the big stuff. If you’ve got a big
conference, go to a hotel. What serviced offices
call meeting and conference rooms are really
meeting and training rooms. The larger serviced
facility you’ll find is typically about triple boardroom
size – 120 to 150 max. Most business centres
will at best have a double boardroom. So the
product is different.”
Catering
As with their superior ability to handle large
scale meetings, hotels also score big with their
in-house catering facilities. Says Marriott’s Paul
Downing: “Hotels can do anything from a creative
coffee break designed to bring a little freshness
back into a meeting to a large dinner reception
which is not locked into a standard menu.”
Most serviced offices, on the other hand, outsource
their catering, which in the main is cold
and served buffet-style. Hot food does not tend
to be in demand for cost reasons. Being simpler,
catering in serviced centres is also less of a
distraction, with shorter breaks allowing everyone
to quickly get back to work.
Service
While any decent hotel will have a full-time,
dedicated conference staff, most serviced offices
have customer service staff who as a function
of their job spec look after clients who happen to
use meeting rooms. From the client’s perspective,
however, whether staff is dedicated or non-dedicated,
they will get the service they require.
Increasingly, though, serviced offices are
promoting specialist meetings staff. Alistair
Stewart of etc.venues says: “We have onsite
staff who are properly trained and who understand
the complexities of audio-visual or that a degree
or two can make a huge difference to a training
course being effective after lunch. It’s that level
of detail that we’re getting into.”
“All the staff are orientated around looking after
one group of customers who are there for business
purposes, rather than handling half a dozen
different customer groups at the same time,
all with different needs.” Kurt Moncz of Regus
agrees: “We have a dedicated team for meeting
rooms. The service team in a serviced office
has one aim: to deliver service to the business
owner. They are not diverted by other issues,
like rooms or dinners.”
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