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Comment by rossenberg79 | Hacker News Reader

There’s lots of reasons to hate WeWork, but not giving a tour isn’t one of them. If they did that for you and a few others then word would get around that you don’t really need appointments for tours and that would cause other problems. Nothing personal.

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what are the problems with showing the place around? literally everyone else is doing that. besides, WeWork once responded to my appointment request a month after the date I requested it for, so they even can't get their brilliant appointment system straight.

> what are the problems with showing the place around?

You and others coming during an event or even focus hours.

Also, I imagine that their willingness to do a tour at random directly correlates with vacancy rate.

It could also be a form of decorum and filtering you out. If they're not hurting for business, they'd probably much prefer clients that responsibly schedule uses of limited resources.

I've never been to a coworking space that wasn't willing to give me a tour when I dropped by.

Maybe wework doesn't like making money.

All coworking spaces I have been to have wanted me to make an appointment, and one did not even let me into the office (which was ridiculous). Maybe this is something which varies by country. And personally I prefer appointments because it makes my life easier to know for sure that they will have someone there who has the time to talk to me.

If they gave tours when their staff had spare capacity to do so and required appointments otherwise, what kind of problems would that cause?

What cost would those problems have to the business? Would those outweigh the lost sales from refusing tours?

That is a fair point. If they are not busy there is not really any reason to not offer a tour. But I can also understand why they heavily prefer appointments. Having random people show up and interrupt your work can be annoying.

It's a communal space. If they see me coming in to an open area as "disrupting" that's probably not a community I'm interested in anyway.

It's not like I was requesting to see a meeting room that was in use.

Appointments are not unusual when arranging for commercial space. Norms are similar to any other professional/B2B environment. I suspect it's a filter. An appointment only process allows the property managers to notify current tenants beforehand; to schedule around shared facility use (e.g. conference rooms); and to research what's available when for how long.

In my mind it's a tell for how future interactions are going to work. Let's say I have a question or some issue with the space, am I going to get to have a normal human interaction or am I going to have to put in a formal request to some automated system and hope somebody responds?

I highly value the first kind of interaction over the second.

Gyms can do it. Is hot desking a bench that much different?

well now it's another reason to hate the we company. I'm sure exceptions are always being made, just OP wasn't able to become one of them. As it stands, a business should have some capacity to take in some walk in prospective clients without scheduling.

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