One of the main challenges organizations encounter is dealing with no-show meetings, where rooms remain booked even if attendees do not show up. No-shows occur for various reasons, such as forgetting to cancel a booking, remote meeting attendance, or simply overlooking a scheduled room reservation. This problem is particularly prevalent for recurring meetings booked far in advance.

Finding an appropriate space for meetings or calls is a fundamental office requirement. Workplace leaders need to ensure that meeting rooms are utilized efficiently. With Mapiq you are enabled to automatically release rooms when no attendees are present. This approach helps free up meeting room space for others who may need it during that time.

In this article, you will learn about the setup and logic behind no-show notifications for booked rooms, including how reminders work, the process of room cancellation, proactive room release options, and how Mapiq provides analytics on meeting room occupancy to improve booking efficiency.

Subscription Owners and Subscription Administrators can turn on reminders for booking workspaces and rooms. You can do this for each building. When the reminder is on, we'll look at which rooms are booked and if they're being used.

When booking reminders are set up, Mapiq verifies if a room is booked and if there are occupants detected in the room.

Mapiq monitors the sensor status from the beginning of a meeting until 5 minutes after it starts. If there is activity in the room during this time frame, no notification is sent, assuming someone may have briefly stepped out. However, if no presence is detected, a notification is sent to the organizer. Depending on the user's notification preferences, we send push (mobile) and/or email notifications, in addition to the standard in-app notification.

In the notification, the employee can confirm their attendance and indicate they are on their way. This action prevents the room from being automatically canceled after the designated time. If the employee fails to confirm the notification AND no presence is detected by the sensor within 10 minutes (15 minutes after the meeting begins), the room will be canceled.

Once the room is canceled, Outlook automatically sends an email to the organizer explaining the reason for the cancellation and encouraging them to install the Mapiq app for future notifications. This ensures that users who have not enabled notifications do not miss important updates.

In addition to employees confirming their arrival and expressing their intention to keep the room, we also provide them with the option to proactively cancel the room if they no longer require it. This allows for the room to be released before the 15-minute threshold expires.

Ensuring the occupancy state of the room is crucial, so sensors must be functioning properly and actively transmitting the occupancy state. Rooms with inactive sensors are excluded from the system to make unused meeting rooms available.

Sensors in an away state are considered as showing "Empty," which triggers notifications 5 minutes after a meeting starts.

When determining if a room is booked, we examine each occurrence. This means that for recurring meetings, we verify if there is a no-show for each specific meeting. If there is a no-show, only the booking for that particular occurrence is canceled.

Mapiq provides insights into the efficiency of your bookable meeting rooms in the meeting room occupancy report. The updated graphs now include information on released rooms. Enabling this functionality should lead to a decrease in the number of no-shows (green section).

For each hour, we analyze 1-minute intervals to determine if a room is booked and in use:

New graphs have been added to offer insights into employee room booking behavior.

Every working hour, we assess whether a room was booked and in use per minute, distinguishing between underused rooms (green) and effectively used rooms (blue). We also track how much time Mapiq freed up the room and released rooms. The released booking section (yellow) indicates bookings that were originally no-shows but were canceled after 15 minutes or by the organizer proactively canceling the booking.

Mapiq also provides reports on different types of meetings to identify any correlation between the number of no-shows and one-time or recurrent meetings, as well as how far in advance meetings were booked.