5 Must-Have Amenities for Any Meeting Room Venue

In the professional world, meeting rooms serve many purposes. Depending on your profession and your immediate needs, a meeting room can play host to client meetings, brainstorming sessions, presentations and more.

Just because a room can fit a large group of people, that doesn’t necessarily make it conducive to holding productive meetings.

For years, one of the few options for professionals needing hourly or daily conference space was a hotel conference room or business center. If you have ever held or attended a meeting in a hotel conference space, you no these are not always ideal venues. While they can be great for large-scale conferences or corporate retreats, you wouldn’t want to schedule a mediation there or or meet with a client regarding a sensitive matter.

For a long time, if you needed to hold a meeting you needed to adjust your needs to fit the function and capacity of the room. Fortunately, the nascent office-space-as-a-service industry has afforded professional demand to dictate the availability and accessibility of meeting rooms.

Now professionals have the power to find the meeting room venue that fits their specific needs. But there are still necessary functions every meeting and conference space must have.

Here are the top five must-have amenities and functions for any meeting room venue:

Parking

Even though this amenity has nothing to do with the meeting room itself, it is essential to any venue nonetheless. On-demand meeting rooms are meant to be accessible to professionals on the go.

If you’re circling the building for 10 minutes looking for street parking or walking from a remote public lot to get to your meeting, it kinda defeats the purpose of the whole accessibility thing, right?

Secure + Reliable Internet

When it comes to the room itself, this is the number one must-have amenity for any venue. Access to secure, reliable internet has transcended a simple amenity in the professional world. Today many day-to-day operations for most business are reliant on internet access.

Video/Teleconferencing

Video and teleconferencing capabilities have long been a standard in boardrooms, but there is a rising demand trend in the hourly meeting room sector as well.

As legal service professions like attorneys and court reporters increasingly look towards on-demand conference space to meet their needs, space operators are realizing the need for A/V access.

Natural light

You may be wondering why this made it in the list of top five meeting room amenities. After all, natural light does not have any effect on the function of a meeting room. This is true. But have you ever considered what effect lack of natural light might have on you?

Recent studies show that access to natural light in a meeting space improves personal welfare and promotes overall productivity.

Even if your needs require a space without windows, make sure the venue’s common areas feature natural light for break sessions or meeting wrap-ups.

Adaptable space

Are you holding a meeting with 5 or 15 people? Do you need additional space for breakout sessions? Will you need desks?

A good meeting room venue should anticipate diverse professional needs in its space offering. A venue with just one meeting room that has limited adaptability in turn has a very limited scope of clientele.