“We have been in the restaurant and hospitality biz for 15 years; coworking is going to be the next driver.” – Riyaaz Amlani, President of the National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI), CEO of Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality Pvt Ltd
Riyaaz Amlani, President of NRAI and CEO of Impresario Entertainment and Hospitality Pvt Ltd, is confident café and bar revenues will be led by the coworking model. “We have been in the restaurant and hospitality biz for 15 years; coworking is going to be the next driver.” Impresario owns the Social brand of work cafes dedicated to coworking.
The Impresario website boldly says that the Social model will be bigger than Starbucks in the coming years. “Starbucks is about the second home, the place home away from home. Social is your workplace and your café. Most people in India today spend much of their time working and you see most doing so from a place like a café. That place will be Social” he said.
Other cafes and PBCL around Dlehi and NCR are slowly but surely catching on too.
Manager of The Beer Café called Biggie Connaught Place said in May, 2016, they had about 14 coworking clients through Qdesq. (But not too many since then).
The Square by CafeCoffeeDay near Janpath Metro entrance has a ‘Huddle Room’ for business meetings. This gets at least a daily booking says its manager.
CoSphere lists cafes and pub bars like Junkyard at CP, 3 Pegs Down at Saket, The Bikers café at Gurgaon and 100% Rock at Vasant Kunj; in 5 days 20 people had bought vouchers to cowork from these venues.
Paras Arora, Cofounder of Qdesq, which reported an undisclosed amount of funding from investors in Jan, 2016, said Qdesq sells about a 100 vouchers for work spaces per month.
Neeren Tiwari, cofounder of FUNBARS Hospitality Pvt Ltd won’t call the profits from coworking phenomenal. He believes it doesn’t look phenomenal because FLYP@MTV has been lucky and doing well. “There are other cafes, pubs and bars that aren’t doing as well. This could really help their sales”. Monthly revenues of FLYP ranging from 1 Cr to 1.5 Cr have been aided at least 10 -15% by revenue from coworking. “But the thing is bars, cafes, clubs and pubs anyway lie idle during the day. They really open for business after 6pm. So I’m not losing. This way I get to generate some percentage from my inventory during the daytime whereas before it was zero percent.”
