A room booking system or solution allows people to find and book rooms or team working areas to work in in an office.  There are often different types of rooms or meeting spaces involved including meeting rooms, meeting pods, phone booths, boardrooms or breakout spaces.  Users may have access to book some, all or none of these and may be subjected to rule such as not having “concurrent bookings” - meaning they can’t have multiple rooms booked at the same time.  Booking solutions should allow resources to be tagged with key amenities – such as VC capable, projection screens or natural light. 

Other popular restrictions include “same day” booking restrictions to make sure some resources are always available for ad hoc use, or not allowing some smaller spaces to be bookable at all. 

Room booking systems commonly allow users to search for and view the locations of colleagues on interactive floorplans, as well as offering the ability to book multiple different resource types along with a room to reserve everything needed for a day in the office. 

Many systems also allow users to book ancillary resources or make service requests as part of a booking.  

Yes - askAiB integrates and synchronises with Exchange calendars, meaning users can book from either calendar without concern about clashses or meetings not showing up in either calendar.

Contact us to learn more and we can set up a "proof of concept" with your system so you can see the sync in action.

In short, booking is finding and reserving a room, while scheduling is the strategic management and tracking of multiple bookings to ensure efficient space utilization. 

Both are important in every office.  Over time, effective scheduling and management can significantly alter the amount and types of spaces required.  Understanding how space is being used, average attendees per meeting and other key metrics will allow organisations to better sweat their real estate assets. 

An effective booking system is key to making enabling this. 

Most organizations will likely not find that a one size fits all approach to providing access to the room estate is an efficient way to manage space. 

Placing some restrictions on which users or teams can access which spaces and when can provide a lot of structure into a hybrid office.  Segmenting the types of room is also often important – for example, “internal” and “external” meeting rooms, or boardrooms vs standard rooms.   

Segmenting resources like this allows granular control of which meetings happen where, and ensure boardrooms capable of holding 20+ people are not only ever used for 1:1s. 

Combining restrictions with advanced booking rules or releases of rules within certain time periods (such as - “this is a boardroom and is restricted to the Executive Team.  If it is the same day and unbooked however, any user can book this room) can add significantly to the flexibility of office space.

Aside from payroll, for a lot of organisations the next greatest expense is office real estate.  In many parts of the world, operating a single person desk can run into many thousands of Dollars, Pounds or Euros. 

It is essential that office space therefore delivers value, and meeting rooms are big, expensive parts of most offices. 

Effective space scheduling, and getting the right meeting happening in the right space, can significantly improve space utilisation and meeting outcomes, helping meetings happen faster.  It can also help reveal if and where inefficiencies are and which space could be repurposed or even off loaded.

When it comes to meeting spaces, getting the space allocations and availability right are crucial.  It’s a little different to desks – typically rooms aren’t assigned permanently to individuals or teams, although they can be for specific projects. 

There are certain high value rooms where controlling access can be important – these are often “client facing” or boardrooms which are often expensive resources showing the best an organisation can offer.  These resources need to be used appropriately.  Time based restrictions can be very helpful here, releasing resources to be bookable only if they are not prebooked for their primary purpose – such as external meetings.  This can also drive up utilisation. 

Other resources such as breakout spaces, internal rooms and phone booths may have wider access permitted.  A common requirement to avoid the plague of meeting no shows is to reserve a portion of these resources to be booked same day only.

This depends a little on the type of meeting room resource.  Many premium spaces remain bookable only in advance. 

However, maintaining a proportion of the estate to be bookable only for “walk ups” or same day bookings can significantly boost utilisation.  Shorter lead times are known to reduce no show rates, with many organisations seeing over 40% no show rates for meetings booked – this can have a meaningful impact on the amount of space required. 

One of the best ways to make sure your room usage stats coming out of your room booking system are accurate and complete is to pick a solution which is the easiest for people to use, requires the fewest clicks and generates the highest levels of user adoption. 

Like every system, it’s good data in – good data out.  In addition to this, your room booking system should provide the flexibility you need to capture the data points that will enable you to really drive office estate value.  Options such as check-in/check-out of space, attendee tracking, integrating into MS Teams and Outlook for easy access and system features such as making sure space restrictions and permission are flexible and reportable will help to make sure you drive value from your system.   

The ability to add custom fields and custom resources is also essential – allowing you to really tailor the booking experience and data points to what you want to measure in your unique office set-up. 

The final piece of the puzzle is reporting and analytics.  Make sure all aspects of the data you capture – including any custom fields or other elements – are reportable.