This is an aggregated snapshot of desk occupancy across the Letswork early-access operator network in Dubai Internet City from January through May 2026. The data comes from our beta operators who have enabled real-time availability sync on the platform. It covers bookings, no-shows, and operator-confirmed occupancy counts. It does not claim to represent all of DIC's coworking market, and we are explicit about that throughout.
The reason we publish this data publicly is straightforward: operators in our network can see their own utilization in the dashboard, but they cannot see how it compares to their neighbors. Publishing the aggregate gives them that context without revealing anyone's individual numbers.
Day-of-week: the midweek peak is steeper than operators expect
Tuesday and Wednesday consistently account for the highest daily booking volumes in the network. Across the January to May window, Tuesday and Wednesday combined represent a disproportionately large share of weekly paid desk-hours. Monday lands roughly 25 to 30 percent below the midweek peak. Friday is the lowest day, which reflects both the shortened working culture in the UAE (many businesses operate a reduced Friday schedule) and the tendency for remote workers and freelancers to opt for home setups at the end of the week.
Thursday occupancy is interesting because it is closer to the midweek peak than Monday is. Thursday feels like a "last productive day" for many DIC knowledge workers, which pushes demand up rather than down as the week ends.
What this means practically for operators running static weekly pricing: they are pricing their busiest inventory at the same rate as their quietest. A Tuesday desk and a Monday desk are the same product on the calendar but very different products in demand terms. Operators who have tested even modest weekday pricing differentials (15 to 20 percent lower on Monday and Friday) have seen booking volume on those days increase without meaningfully cannibalizing midweek revenue.
Time-of-day: the midmorning window is the hardest to fill
The 9am to 11am slot is consistently the lowest-fill period in the network relative to available capacity. This runs counter to the intuition that early morning is premium time for productive work. What the data actually shows is that a large portion of the DIC member base does not plan their workspace until the morning of the booking, which means early slots go unbooked when the booking lead time is short.
Operators with a 24-hour advance booking requirement see lower fill rates on 9am slots than operators who allow same-day booking with a cutoff of 8am or 7:30am. The earliest-available same-day window that fills well is actually the 10am to 1pm slot, which suggests members are making booking decisions during their commute rather than the night before.
Afternoon slots (2pm to 6pm) have the highest fill rate per available desk across the network. This is partly because afternoon bookings often extend from midday bookings, and partly because afternoon is when the "I need a quiet space for a call" impulse booking is most common among DIC professionals.
Space type: hot desks fill faster, pods earn more per hour
Open hot-desks have the highest average utilization rate across the network. They are the most flexible inventory: no specific desk assignment, easy to oversell slightly without conflict, and appealing to the widest slice of demand. Private pods and dedicated desks have lower utilization rates but higher average hourly revenue when filled.
The yield math is genuinely different between space types. An operator optimizing for utilization rate should weight their inventory toward hot desks. An operator optimizing for revenue per square meter should weight toward private pods and dedicated desk rooms, because those command a significant price premium that more than compensates for sitting empty more often. There is no universal right answer, and the right balance depends on the operator's space layout, their member mix, and how much management overhead they can absorb.
Meeting rooms are a separate category. Utilization is lower than either hot desks or private pods during regular work hours, but the bookings tend to cluster tightly: a two-hour morning meeting followed by a two-hour afternoon booking is common, with dead time in between. Operators who allow half-day meeting room blocks rather than full-day only tend to see better overall fill rates on those rooms.
The empty-desk gap at the weekly level
The most actionable number in this dataset is what we call the weekly empty-desk gap: the difference between declared available capacity and actual paid occupancy across the week. Across our early-access network, the average operator has a notable gap concentrated on Monday morning and Friday afternoon. These are the two windows where demand most reliably falls short of available supply.
Closing that gap even partially does not require new desks or a larger space. It requires routing demand differently: pricing signals, same-day booking availability, and better visibility of which slots are open. An operator who moves from "I know I'm not full on Monday" to "I know exactly which desks are empty between 9am and 1pm on Monday and I have a pricing signal pointing demand toward them" is in a fundamentally different position to act.
What we are not claiming
This data covers a small early-access network, not the Dubai coworking market as a whole. Operators self-select into the beta program, and the selection is not random: they are operators who are already interested in utilization data, which means they may manage their availability more carefully than a typical operator. The patterns we see may not generalize to all DIC coworking spaces.
We are also measuring bookings and operator-confirmed counts, not physical sensors. If an operator's availability calendar is not kept current, their data contributes noise rather than signal. We run data-quality checks on operator inputs and flag stale calendars, but we cannot guarantee perfection across every space in the network.
We will publish the second-half 2026 snapshot later this year. By that point, we expect the network to be larger and the patterns to be clearer. The goal is to give operators a data context they currently have no other way to access.
