What coworking taught Carl Heinz Pierre about hospitality marketing

I am Carl Heinz Pierre, and before I ran paid media for luxury hotels I ran coworking spaces. In 2015, Washingtonian named me one of the city's top tech leaders for heading WeWork's three Washington DC locations, roughly 1,500 members under one operating model. Most people treat coworking and hospitality as different industries. They are the same business wearing different clothes. Both sell space, belonging, and the quiet satisfaction of having chosen well.

That continuity is the most useful thing I carry from one career into the next. The tools changed when I moved into hospitality. The product did not. Understanding why is the whole point of this piece, and it reorders how I think about every marketing dollar I spend today.

Coworking and hotels sell the same product, and it is not the room

When I started in coworking, I thought I was in real estate. Lease the floor, fit it out, fill the desks, collect the rent. That framing lasted about a month. What members actually paid for was not square footage. It was the version of themselves they became inside the space, the introductions that happened at the coffee bar, the sense that the address said something about their ambition. The desk was the least of it.

Luxury hospitality runs on the identical truth. A guest paying well over a thousand dollars a night is not buying a bed and a view. They are buying a story they get to tell and a few days of being the kind of person who stays at this kind of place. The physical product is the floor under the experience, not the experience itself. Marketers who sell the room lose. Marketers who sell the meaning win. I learned that lesson on a coworking floor in DC years before I ever applied it to a portfolio of hotels.

1,500 members taught me occupancy math retail never could

Three WeWork buildings and around 1,500 occupants taught me the brutal arithmetic of perishable inventory. A desk empty on Tuesday is revenue you can never recover. A hotel room unsold tonight is gone the same way. Both businesses live and die on occupancy against a fixed supply, and both punish you for chasing the wrong demand at the wrong price.

In coworking I watched operators fill space with discounts, then spend two years trying to raise prices on members who only ever came for the deal. The cheap desk poisoned the yield. Hospitality has the same trap dressed in different numbers. Fill rooms through the wrong channel at the wrong rate and you train a guest base that will never pay what the property is worth. The discipline is identical in both: protect the rate, manage the mix, and treat occupancy as a margin problem rather than a volume one.

Retail marketing never forced me to think this way. When you can reorder inventory, a slow day is a forecasting note, not a permanent loss. Coworking removed that safety net, and hospitality rewarded the habit. Every empty unit is a deadline you already missed, which means the marketing has to create demand on the property's terms, not rent it cheaply from a discount channel.

Community was the product, not the amenity

The biggest mistake I see in both industries is treating community as a line item, a perk you bolt on after the real product ships. In coworking, the events and the member network were not marketing for the desks. They were the desks. The reason someone renewed had almost nothing to do with the chair and everything to do with who they had met and what the membership made possible.

Hospitality keeps relearning this. The properties that win loyalty are not the ones with the longest amenity list. They are the ones that make a guest feel like part of something the moment they walk in, and like they are giving something up when they leave. That feeling is a brand strategy decision, not a front-desk script. Bloomberg interviewed me about WeWork during the years the model was rewriting how people thought about work, and the question underneath every conversation was the same one luxury hotels ask now. How do you turn a transaction into a sense of belonging? Get that right and retention stops being a campaign. It becomes the product.

The jump from coworking to luxury hotels is shorter than it looks

On paper, going from coworking operator to hospitality marketer reads like a career change. In practice it was a continuation. Both businesses sell access to a curated environment. Both depend on a long, considered decision rather than an impulse buy. Both are judged on whether the lived experience matches the promise that sold it. And both get measured wrong by anyone who imports a framework built for selling objects off a shelf.

The DC coworking scene I came up in, documented at the time by Washingtonian, WAMU, and Northern Virginia Magazine, was an early lesson in selling experience before the experience economy had a name everyone agreed on. The Urban Land Institute was writing about coworking transforming the office while most marketers still thought the category was about cheap desks and free beer. Carrying that lens into luxury hospitality at Auberge Collection was less a pivot than a promotion. Same product underneath. Higher stakes, longer booking windows, and a guest who expects the story to be flawless from the first search to the final checkout.

There is a practical edge to having lived both. When I plan paid media for a resort now, I am not guessing at how people decide to spend money on a place they have never been. I watched 1,500 people make that decision every month in coworking, at a smaller price point and a faster cycle, and the psychology barely changes as the number of zeroes grows. The booking window stretches, the consideration deepens, but the underlying question a buyer asks is constant. Will this place make me feel the way I want to feel?

The shift worth making

Stop selling the inventory and start selling the identity the inventory unlocks. A desk, a room, a membership, a stay, none of them are the product. The product is who the customer gets to be while they have it.

For anyone marketing space, whether it is offices in DC or suites in a resort, the lesson holds. Sell the meaning, protect the rate, and treat community as the thing itself rather than the garnish. I write more in Hospitality Marketing and on my background, with a companion piece on why hospitality marketing breaks retail attribution. For the third-party coverage behind that DC coworking work, see Carl Pierre in the press. I also write about Washington DC and the DMV.