As the pandemic continues to recede and travel and hospitality leaders look to the future of their businesses, it’s clear that long-term success in the lodging industry will require adaptation, innovation, and even a rethinking of long-held assumptions about the services a hotel should provide. An emerging paradigm shift may offer clues as to the future of hospitality: with a surge in hybrid and remote work and the blending of business and leisure travel, hotels are seeing an opportunity to complement traditional coworking services as providers of flexible workspaces for in-person work that’s still necessary and inevitable.

In short, the future of hospitality is inextricably linked to the “future of work.” Here’s why hospitality leaders should pay attention, and how to unlock this new opportunity.

In an adaptable, mobile work economy, space is a service. The commercial real estate industry began adopting this philosophy even pre-pandemic as part of a wave of secular changes that gave rise to traditional coworking providers. Building on the “third space” concept embodied by coffee shops and other locations filling a niche in between home and the office, these providers recognized the value of cross-functional, well-designed and inspiring venues that were functional for both work and play, and that could facilitate community and connection as much as productivity. In this model, space is the offering and also the differentiator.

Activating hospitality venues for key workplace functions is a fuller realization of this “space-as-a-service” philosophy, and hotel brands are missing a critical use case if they’re only selling rooms and not also selling spaces and experiences. Hotels have a unique value proposition in this regard: they offer home-like amenities and opportunities for interaction and engagement along with spaces that can be used for in-person meetings and work on the go, often in great locations that draw corporations and tourists alike. This gives hotels an opportunity to disrupt the coworking industry by hooking into certain shortcomings, namely inflexible spaces and membership models. As we’re seeing, the future of work will bring more people together in magnetic, lifestyle hotel settings for a variety of use cases beyond just solo coworking, including onboarding breakouts, company off-sites, and annual company retreats.

In this way, hotels serve as the new office — and perhaps the new company café, conference suite and training destination — in an increasingly mobile world where work and play blend, and where flexibility rules. Recent analysis from real estate group Colliers, for example, points to hotels’ competitive advantage over traditional coworking spaces, thanks to the “service-first” nature of hospitality and the more flexible operational model of hotels that can accommodate even just daily usage without a lease.

It’s also clear that there’s a fast-growing market for the work-from-hotel model. A study this year from the American Hotel & Lodging Association found that 89 percent of business travelers now want to include a private holiday in their business trips. Similar research from Skift, a travel industry news and analysis platform, finds that at least 3.7 million Americans are now positioned to both live and work as digital nomads. This multifaceted rise in “bleisure” travel has created an entirely new guest persona that hotel brands will need to accommodate. I’ve been this new kind of traveler myself, arriving in a new city on a Thursday night, meeting with key team members, entertaining on site, and then working from a hotel lobby on Friday to extend a weekend away.

Beyond bleisure travel, the expansion of remote work points to yet another opportunity for hotels. The distributed workforce operating in a hub-and-spoke dynamic is quickly becoming a new normal, and while a central company headquarters can serve as a periodic meeting point for employees at larger corporations, smaller organizations may in fact turn to hotels as their hubs. Consider an increasingly likely scenario in which a business owner lives in New York with a primarily West Coast–based team, and chooses Los Angeles as the location for monthly check-ins and other in-person sessions. Why would that business leader fly to Los Angeles, stay in a hotel, and then rent a coworking space that’s only rarely used, if instead he/she could accomplish everything from their hotel? For leaders with dispersed workforces, facilitating a place where they and their employees can work together is more important than ever, and hotels can efficiently provide everything for the remote or hybrid workforce user.

The case is strong, but what does a hotel need in order to succeed in this role? As a first step, it’s important to identify best practices in programming and design. From a user perspective, a hotel needs to offer cross-functional spaces that fit different travel personas and different needs. On the one hand, this means designing areas that function well for work — with dedicated productivity and meeting spaces that offer advanced conferencing technology and a robust infrastructure, such as 5G connectivity that allows for the use of private networks. It also means providing flex spaces such as rooftops, meeting rooms, restaurants and cafes, shared lounges, and other informal areas.

For a hotel to truly function as an effective venue for the future of work, hospitality providers also need to think holistically and creatively about what space-as-a-service means in this context. For example, the next phase of hospitality might involve subscriptions such as citizenM’s new mycitizenM+ program, a major value proposition for remote and hybrid workers who can then take advantage of guaranteed rooms and the ability to stay and work anywhere the hotel brand has a location. In this way, the hotel actually becomes a network of frictionless spaces that workers and work teams can use nationally and globally — with all the benefits of hospitality service.

The pandemic exposed existential shortcomings in the hospitality industry’s longstanding approach to operations. And the challenges continue to appear: In early 2020, the issue was a total lack of guestroom revenue; now, labor shortages and inflation are creating pain points. Hospitality leaders need to shift their approach towards active asset management and away from the conception of the hotel as simply a collection of guestrooms and F&B offerings.

The world around us is changing as more people travel and work differently, and new and creative business models are crucial. By combining the space-as-a-service philosophy with the inherent experiential advantages of a hospitality provider, hotels can succeed in many ways all at the same time. Everyone wants to work, sleep and play. Let’s make hotels the destination for all three.