Why am I unable to use Twig conditional on entry.type property?
Your problem is that entry.type is actually not a string, but an instance of EntryTypeModel. This means that entry.type is an object containing many different properties, among them the handle, which would be the property that you want to test in this case.

In other words, this should work:

{{ entry.type.handle starts with 'meetingsEvents' }}


Tip: When in doubt about the data your working with, or stuff not working like you'd think, it's often a good idea to dump:

{{ dump( entry.type ) }}


This will output all sorts of useful information about the data, e.g. what it actually is (String, Object etc), all its properties and methods etc.