Reflection: Hospitality Isn’t the Latte. It’s the Reliability. (Still True.)

In May 2024, I had the opportunity to join a virtual panel for the Flexworld Series hosted by OfficeRnD, alongside Ed Hobbs (National GM at X+Y) and moderator Ivan Guberkov, VP of Product at OfficeRnD. The topic was hospitality, which is one of those concepts that everyone in flex workspace talks about, but not everyone defines the same way. It often gets reduced to snacks, events, coffee upgrades, or whatever looks good on a tour. But what I shared then, and what I believe even more strongly now, is that hospitality isn’t what you add. Hospitality is what you remove. You remove friction. You remove uncertainty. You remove distractions. Because at the end of the day, members aren’t really buying office space. They’re buying the ability to walk in and get work done.

At Firmspace, we’ve always treated hospitality as something operational. It’s not just a brand idea or a vibe. It’s part of the product. Our entire experience is built around privacy, security, and productivity, which means hospitality has to support those pillars in real, measurable ways. If a member walks into our space and everything works the way it’s supposed to, that’s hospitality. If they walk in and nothing works, it doesn’t matter how good the coffee is. A warm greeting is important, but it is not the differentiator. Consistency is.

That framing has only gotten more relevant since that panel aired. The market has shifted. Expectations have sharpened. Costs have risen, competition has intensified, and the overall bar for “basic coworking competency” is higher than it used to be. In 2024, hospitality was becoming a differentiator. In 2026, it’s table stakes. But reliability is still rare. And reliability is what creates trust. When you deliver a consistent experience day after day, you’re not just providing service. You’re giving people confidence that their workday won’t get interrupted by things that shouldn’t be problems in the first place.

We also spoke on the panel about measurement, because operators are always looking for a “hospitality metric” they can point to. Like many providers, we track NPS, and it can be helpful as a signal. But I still believe what I said then: if a hospitality problem shows up in an NPS survey, you’re already too late. NPS is not the frontline. It’s a smoke alarm. The real frontline is what happens every day in the space. Did someone notice something was off? Did we address it early? Did the member feel supported? Hospitality is best reflected in retention, relationships, and reputation, not just a score.

One phrase I shared that day has stayed with me because it captures what hospitality really looks like in practice: relentless troubleshooting (coined by Firmspace VP Ops, Kristin Kirk). Not basic support. Not “submit a ticket.” Relentless troubleshooting means we solve the problem. If someone can’t print, we solve it. If meeting tech isn’t connecting, we solve it. If their corporate IT team shows up with a compliance checklist and skepticism about flex environments, we solve it. We configure what needs to be configured, we validate what needs to be validated, and we make sure the workspace is never the reason someone can’t do their job. That is hospitality at the professional level. People don’t care what the problem is. They care whether the problem interrupts their day. And if it does, they remember.

One of the better moments of the conversation was the question around operational efficiency. There’s this assumption that hospitality and efficiency are opposites, and that you can either deliver high-touch experience or you can protect margin. I don’t believe that’s true. Great hospitality often comes down to disciplined execution. Sometimes that means doing less, but doing it better. Like many operators, we experimented with expanded food programs coming out of COVID, and it made sense at the time. But free food is a tricky thing. It can become wasteful quickly, and worse, it can turn into an expectation instead of a delight. Over time we found the more sustainable hospitality move wasn’t to do more giveaways, but to build systems around convenience and consistency, like premium honest-market options based on what members actually want.

Toward the end of the panel, we were asked about small gestures that made a big impact. My answer wasn’t dramatic, but it’s the one I’m proudest of. We still have our first-ever member, someone who signed up before our first Austin location even opened. He took a hard-hat tour, saw the vision, and decided to trust us early. That relationship represents the highest form of hospitality: not the grand gestures, not the perfect tour, not the marketing language. It’s whether you continue to deliver what you promised, year after year, and whether you remain the company they believed you were going to be.

I’m grateful to OfficeRnD and the Flexworld Series team for making space for these conversations, and to Ed for bringing a strong global perspective on hospitality, community, and partnerships. But if there’s one thing I’ll keep saying, regardless of what year it is, it’s this: hospitality in flex is not an amenity. It is the product. And in a market where space is everywhere, the operators who win will be the ones who can deliver something rarer than square footage: consistency, trust, and reliability.

Still true today.