Walk into almost any independent hotel and you will find it: the business center. Two beige PCs nobody has logged into since 2014, a printer that is permanently out of cyan, a laminated sign about fax services, and a chair that someone clearly stole from a conference room. It is the saddest 120 square feet in the building, and it is costing you money every single day it sits there pretending to be useful.
I run an SEO and AEO shop in Orlando working only with independent and boutique hotels, and the business center is one of my favorite things to talk hoteliers into killing. Not because the space is worthless, but because it is worth so much more than the function you have assigned it. The remote-work-and-stay traveler is real, day-use revenue is real, and the people searching for a decent place to work for eight hours are searching right now. Your dead business center can become a small, profitable coworking destination. Here is exactly how I think about making that happen.
Why the business center died and what replaced the demand
The business center existed to solve a problem that no longer exists. People used to need a hotel to print a boarding pass, send a fax, or find a computer with internet. Phones killed all of that. Nobody walks up to your front desk asking to use a desktop anymore.
But the underlying demand did not disappear. It mutated. The traveler who needed to print one document is now the remote worker who needs to be productive for a full day, on calls, with real wifi, somewhere that is not a cramped room or a coffee shop where the only outlet is behind the espresso machine. That person has money and very few good options. Coffee shops are loud and have no privacy. Public libraries close early and feel weird for a video call. Dedicated coworking memberships are overkill for someone in town for three nights.
You already own the answer. You have the square footage, the wifi, the coffee, the bathrooms, the parking, and a front desk that can hand someone a keycard. You are sitting on a coworking space and marketing it as a fax machine.
The business center is not underperforming. It is mis-positioned. The same room, re-described and made bookable, shifts from a sunk cost into a day-use revenue line you can actually market.
Repositioning the physical space (cheap, fast, mostly cosmetic)
Before any marketing, the space has to be honestly sellable. You do not need a renovation budget. You need to remove what signals dead amenity and add what signals workspace.
Rip out the obvious relics. The ancient PCs, the fax sign, the printer nobody trusts. Keep one good printer and make it self-service or front-desk-assisted. The room should read as a place to bring your own laptop, not a place to use the hotel’s hardware.
Fix the three things remote workers actually rank. In order: wifi that genuinely holds a video call, power at every seat, and a chair you can sit in for six hours. If you nail nothing else, nail those. A pretty room with bad wifi gets one-starred instantly.
Create visible work zones. Even in a small footprint you can signal “focused desk,” “phone-call nook,” and “small meeting table.” People pay for the feeling that the space was designed for work, not for the feeling that they are squatting in a former storage room.
Light and coffee. Good light makes a small space feel professional on camera. Bottomless coffee or a deal with your own cafe is the cheapest perceived-value upgrade you can buy.
None of this is expensive. The expensive part is leaving it the way it is.
The two products hiding in one room
Once the space is sellable, you are not selling one thing. You are selling two, and they have different buyers.
Day-use coworking is the individual. A remote worker, a consultant in town, a guest who checked out at 11 but has a flight at 8 and needs somewhere to work. Sold as a day pass or a few-hour block. Low price, high volume, almost pure margin because the space would otherwise sit empty.
Bookable meeting and micro-event space is the group. The local team that needs a half-day offsite, the sales rep who needs a room for four client meetings, the small board that wants neutral ground. Higher price, lower volume, and it often comes with food and beverage attached.
These two products fill different hours and different days. Coworking fills weekday daytime. Meetings cluster around specific bookings. Together they monetize an asset that currently earns zero between breakfast and the evening rush.
| Product | Buyer | Pricing logic | What it fills |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day-use coworking pass | Remote worker, day guest | Priced vs coffee shops and local coworking | Empty weekday daytime hours |
| Half-day or hourly desk block | In-town professional | Priced per block, light F and B add-on | Mid-day gaps and afternoons |
| Small meeting table | Local team, small board | Priced per room with catering upsell | Specific booked windows |
| Work-and-stay package | Remote-work traveler | Room rate plus guaranteed workspace | Multi-night midweek stays |
That last row is the one I push hardest with independents. A work-and-stay package bundles the room with guaranteed desk access and reliable wifi, and it targets the traveler who is choosing where to spend a productive week. That is a direct-booking play, and direct booking is where your margin lives.
Why this is a direct-booking and a search story, not just an operations story
Here is the part most hoteliers miss. A coworking offer is one of the rare amenities that creates its own search demand, separate from your room inventory. Nobody searches an OTA for “place to work for a day.” They search Google. They ask an AI assistant. And those searches land on whoever has actually published a clear, indexable answer.
The OTAs do not sell your day-use coworking. They cannot. This is demand they have no claim on, which makes it some of the healthiest revenue in your building. Every day pass and every work-and-stay booking that comes through your own site is a booking with no commission attached. When I talk to owners about reducing OTA dependence and winning back a healthier direct mix, this is one of the clearest examples I can point to. You can read my full breakdown of the math in the real cost of OTA commission, but the short version is that OTA commissions run roughly 15 to 25 percent, and coworking revenue can dodge that entirely if you market it yourself.
To capture it, the offer needs a real home on your site. Not a line buried on an amenities page. Its own URL, with its own headline, photos of the actual space, the price, the wifi speed, the hours, and a booking button. That page is what Google indexes and what an AI engine reads when someone asks it where to work in your city. If you have ever wondered whether AI assistants even know your hotel exists, I wrote about exactly that in is your hotel invisible to ChatGPT and the same logic applies here: if it is not clearly described and structured, it does not exist to the machine.
How people actually search for this
The remote-work traveler does not search the way a vacationer does. The phrasing is functional. I see patterns like:
- work-friendly hotel near me
- hotel with day-use desk or office
- place to work for a day in [your city]
- quiet hotel lobby to work from
- coworking near [neighborhood] for a day
Some of those have modest individual volume, but the intent is laser-sharp and the competition is thin, because almost no independent hotel has bothered to publish a page that answers them. That is your opening. Thin competition plus clear intent is the best setup in local search.
There is also the AI-assistant layer, which is growing fast. The broad category of optimizing for AI answers is what people now call AEO, or answer engine optimization, a term pulling around 27,100 US searches a month, alongside related ideas like generative engine optimization at roughly 5,400. The point is not the jargon. The point is that more people are asking an assistant “where can I work for the day near downtown” and getting a short list back. You want to be on that list, and you get there by being unambiguously described. My hotel AI visibility service exists for exactly this, and the local SEO and Google Business Profile work is what makes you show up for the near-me version of these searches.
The hotels that win day-use coworking are not the ones with the nicest desks. They are the ones whose coworking offer is the easiest for a search engine, and now an AI assistant, to find and repeat. Clarity beats furniture.
A practical rollout I would actually run
If a boutique hotel handed me this project tomorrow, here is the sequence I would follow.
Week one: make it real. Clear out the relics, fix wifi and power, stage the space, and take honest photographs. You cannot market a promise you cannot deliver, and the first one-star review about dead wifi will outrank your marketing.
Week two: build the page. One dedicated URL for the coworking and day-use offer. Headline, photos, price, hours, wifi speed, what is included, and a booking or inquiry button. Add the work-and-stay package as its own clear option. Make sure it is linked from your main navigation and your local profile.
Week three: claim the local and AI surface. Update your Google Business Profile so the workspace and day-use options show up in the near-me searches, add the relevant attributes, and make the description machine-readable. This is the step that turns a nice page into a found page.
Week four: cross-sell and measure. Train the front desk to mention the day pass at checkout for late-flight guests. Offer the work-and-stay rate to midweek inquiries. Track day passes sold, package nights booked, and how many coworking buyers later book a room or a meeting. The data tells you where to push.
The reason this works for independents specifically is that you can move this fast. A chain has to route this through a brand committee. You can decide on Monday and be selling desks by Friday.
What this is not
I want to be straight with you, because I have watched owners over-rotate on this. Repositioning a business center is not going to transform your P and L on its own, and it is not going to make you the WeWork of your zip code. It is incremental revenue from space you already pay for, plus a genuinely useful new way for travelers and locals to discover your hotel. That is the honest frame. It is a strong, low-risk addition, not a silver bullet.
It also is not a reason to neglect the basics. If your hotel still ranks below the OTAs when someone searches your own name, fix that first; I wrote about why that happens because it is the more urgent leak. Coworking is the upside play you layer on once the foundation is solid.
Where to start
If your business center is currently a museum of obsolete office equipment, you are sitting on day-use revenue and a fresh direct-booking channel that the OTAs cannot touch. The work is mostly clarity: make the space genuinely usable, give it a real page, and make sure search engines and AI assistants can find and describe it. Done right, it reduces your reliance on commissioned bookings and brings new people through your doors.
If you want a second set of eyes on how to position the offer, build the page so it actually ranks, and get it surfacing in AI answers, that is precisely the kind of work I do. Take a look at my book-direct CRO service for the conversion side, or just book a call and we will map out what your dead business center could be earning instead.