WeWork - 501 Boylston St

Molly Hoke a year ago

Update 8/30/23: This company is not reputable. They supposedly approved a refund on 8/8 and I was to have it in 5-10 business days. I wait that amount of time and call to check (they had already closed the ticket) and was told the person gave me the wrong information before and it was not approved until 8/19 (and so have to wait 5-10 more business days). I asked multiple times for a receipt or proof the refund was definitely on the way to no avail nor would they connect me to the billing dept. July 2023 Neat historic building, great views, cool place to work with other people in person or solo, and nice community managers. But I would not recommend this to host any kind of meeting where you need to conference in virtual attendees, especially in a larger room. We rented 3 rooms over 2 days and had many issues. Here is what you should know prior to booking any rooms here and what I wish I would have been advised of: 1. No onsite IT support and no one comes to check to see if you are having any issues. Need to go to the Community Manager desk if you need help 2. Only 2 of the 15 rooms available for rent for meeting space (10D & 10J, both which hold 4) are equipped with videoconference equipment (touchpad, USB-C cable, and TV). Meaning for the other rooms, you have to project onto a TV from your laptop and use the sound from there for the whole room to be able to hear your virtual attendees. (Or I guess you could use a phone but not all rooms have phones.) In larger rooms, there are no microphones, so your virtual attendees will have trouble hearing anyone who is speaking that is not close to the laptop being used to project. And the person projecting has to share their screen with the room and also remember to share on Zoom. If it was set up to videoconference, it would all be seamless and just sharing any content/slides via Zoom needed. 3. The volume in 10G is either way to loud or way too soft. The volume button seems broken; in our case it was turned down to the lowest level but the volume in the room coming in from virtual attendees was entirely too loud. After the event, when I spoke to the Community Managers about it, they were gracious but said the audio problem is a known, ongoing issue with that room and that IT has come to check it and said it's fine. 4. 10G is also supposed to have a SoundBar in the room so virtual attendees can hear the people in the room talking. I didn't know our room was supposed to have that so didn't know to ask for one. Partially thru the meeting, one of my colleagues kindly tried to help resolve the overly loud volume in the room and virtual attendees not being able to hear people in the room talking and was given the sound bar. The batteries were dead and it needed charged, and that is the only one they had. 5. As part of the meeting in 10G, we had an important breakout in 10E and they lost internet during their discussion. It came back on but it added to a poor experience for virtual and online attendees 6. There no informatiom provided UP FRONT that as most of the rooms don't have video conference capabilities, that to project from a laptop onto a room screen and to be able to hear the sound via the speakers and not the laptop, that you need to be logged in thru the WeWorkWiFi via the accoutn info of the person who completed the booking (they will get an assigned password when they login to that specific WiFi). (It won't work thru the WeWork Guest WiFi.) Apparently it is also OK to share these credentials with your attendees if they are using other booked rooms at the same time. Why I had to find both of these important pieces of information via asking vs having it shared with me proactively before our event is beyond me. It's a shame our group had such a poor experience here as we spent almost $6 K over the 2 days and would have been repeat customers. The A/V was by far the worst I ever experienced for a meeting I organized (and I have hosted a number of these kinds of events).