What do you get when you combine well-thought-out interior design venues, fully-equipped meeting rooms, and easy online booking platforms, in key city locations such as Brussels, Paris, and soon in Madrid?
COMET Meetings, a really simple idea in adapted venues, dedicated to meetings and seminars.
What is COMET Meetings’s Unique selling point?
In comparison to other meeting halls in the hospitality industry, the key difference in COMET’s value proposition is that it is committed to developing creative meeting spaces, in the center of the city, with proper technical support, and tailor-made catering services. This is what we call a “co-meeting” venue. Also, in contrast to co-working spaces, companies do not rent workstations for a long period, but book private meeting rooms for a day or half-day. In addition to that, in all COMET’s venues, users can configure the meeting room according to their needs and objectives. For instance, sometimes companies want to brainstorm ideas, create workshops, gather employees or they might just want to meet through a teambuilding day . Hence, COMET understands this kind of disruptive concept and has developed a set of adaptive spaces.
Rodolphe, who’s the Head of Sales in Belgium, explains: “We strongly believe at COMET that meeting is an art and you need someone dedicated to helping you organize your day. We also know how important these meetings are both to companies and individuals, this is why we need to make sure that it’s the biggest day of the company. We need to make sure that the place is adapted. We need to make sure that everybody is welcomed. We need to make sure that they are going to create great ideas during their brainstorming sessions or strategic meetings”.
About the new Belgian location, COMET Meetings Louise, Rodolphe explains: “Called The “Great Escape”, our venue consists of 2,800 square meters on eight floors. Then every floor is decorated and themed as a different destination across the world. Rodolphe continues: “COMET is trying to disrupt the stone-aged meeting rooms structure. What we do in COMET is create a meeting as an experience – just like retail, hotel or restaurant – , and then adapt the interior to serve that purpose”. Each floor’s ambience is designed specifically to the customer’s meeting target. For instance, if people want a place to brainstorm and be creative, we would allocate bright-themed meeting rooms, themed Colombia’.
What are the challenges of this specific market segment?
As an actor of corporate events, we obviously need to face the crisis and be very flexible. For example, we need to be able to adapt according to the rules and regulations with regards to the COVID restrictions. We need to make sure that we help our clients in the organization of the meeting day, 100% safely. So what we do at COMET is breaking down the silo of pre-agreements, terms, regulations and cancellations. With this flexibility, we give people the freedom to cancel, without any charges, three days in advance. If there is any deposit, our clients will either receive back their deposit or postpone it for the next scheduled meeting.
Also, another challenge can be how people perceive meeting spaces and how to change it. About that, communication and pedagogy is key to solve this misunderstanding. This is why COMET decided to be a pioneer and create a new market segment, the tailor-made meeting spaces, called the “co-meeting” market.
Why three days-flexible terms?
Because, as mentioned earlier, COMET is not only about meeting offices but tailor-made meeting spaces with a catering option. Therefore, we’ve got internal food and beverage preparation, and we want to make sure that no resources are going to waste.
What are the future possibilities of meeting spaces?
We are still at the very beginning of this new market segment. Of course, the first thing we need to mention is adaptable spaces and the ability to hyper-customize experiences.
Especially, when we analyse the post-COVID work environment, we believe that adaptable venues for collaboration moments and fast meetings are worth discovering !
Do you have any future geographical expansion and product developments?
We need to always remember that COMET Meetings was co-founded in 2016. They opened their first place in 2017, and then expanded to five more locations in Paris and Brussels. However, at the moment, we are delighted to announce that we’re going to open in Spain, Madrid at the beginning of 2022. So, globally, COMET Meetings can be found in 10 locations. We also expanded our business model to include catering and hospitality services.
On top of that, we are focused on our Cosmos digital platform, which I believe is really interesting. It’s a platform that can be further developed and added to in the future of work. Cosmos is the facilitating service of everything. People can book shared meeting rooms, they can request multimedia options to be installed and connected before their meetings, they can organize events, activities, conferences, food and catering too, all from their mobile devices.
Obviously we look at every single opportunity, but “sky’s the limit” and we strongly believe that the movement of adaptable, customized meeting experience has begun and COMET Meetings is committed to help transition the segment into the future of work with a new solution !
Project Manager