Occupancy Sensor Data: What Empty Meeting Rooms Really Cost

A booking system knows who reserved the room. An occupancy sensor knows whether anyone turned up. The rent is the same either way.

Try to book a meeting room for 2pm on a Tuesday and it's often taken. Walk past it at 2pm and it's often empty. The booking system only knows who reserved the room, not whether they came. An occupancy sensor does, because it picks up whether people are actually in the space.

Aireavu fits occupancy sensors to a building and shows how its spaces are really used, so you can compare one space with another. A room booked all day can turn out to be empty for most of it, and the booking record will never say so. The same data helps with the energy bill too. In one multi-site deployment of relocatable buildings, Aireavu's platform used occupancy and environmental conditions to adjust heating and cooling automatically, and average energy savings came out at over 60%.

Outside Aireavu's own results, workplace analytics firm Density compared meeting room bookings with sensor data in two offices of one Fortune 500 company in the US, from January to April 2023. More than one in four bookings turned out to be ghost meetings, where nobody was in the room in the first 15 minutes. That was 24.5% in Houston and 28.1% in New York. The booking records alone would never have shown it. It's one company in one country, so read it as a sign of the pattern, not a UK average.

Rent is the easiest cost to put a number on. Knight Frank puts prime office rents in UK regional cities at £41.50 to £52.50 per square foot a year in the second quarter of 2026. A 20 square metre meeting room is about 215 square feet, so that's roughly £8,900 to £11,300 a year for one room. That's prime rent, the top of the market, so yours may well be lower. Rates, service charge, heating, cooling and cleaning all come on top, and you pay for every bit of it whether anyone's in the room or not.

Want to check your own rooms? Pick the ones that always seem to be booked and compare the bookings with occupancy sensor readings over a few weeks. If a room is booked solid but mostly empty, you may not need more space. You may just need a way to release it when nobody turns up.

Book a consultation with Aireavu to see what an occupancy sensor would show in your own building.

^Sources

^{Density, "Bust Ghost Meetings" (ebook, vendor-published, undated; data from January to April 2023) — cited for: more than one in four booked meetings were ghost meetings; 24.5% in Houston and 28.1% in New York; a ghost meeting is a booking with zero occupancy in the first 15 minutes; meetings of one hour or less, Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm; one unnamed Fortune 500 company, two US sites. https://insights.density.io/hubfs/eBooks/Density-Bust%20Ghost%20Meetings.pdf}

^{Knight Frank, "UK Cities Quarterly Office Market Review, Q2 2026" — cited for: prime office rents of £41.50 (Glasgow) to £52.50 (Leeds) per square foot per year in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Prime rent is the top of the market. Worked example: 20 square metres x 10.764 = about 215 square feet; 215 x £41.50 = about £8,900 and 215 x £52.50 = about £11,300 a year. https://www.knightfrank.co.uk/site-assets/research/report-pdfs/uk-cities/ukcities_q2-2026_final.pdf}