Need some breathing room at short notice? This app wants to be the Airbnb for offices

As a yoga buff who does her deep “breathe in, breathe out” drill religiously, my heart skipped a beat when I came across the term “BreathingRoom”. What, an app that gives me a room to do my favorite morning thing! Well, not quite, it turned out; but neither was I too off the mark.

Are you a cash crunched, space scrunched startup? Are you a work-from-home entrepreneur? Are you someone who needs to travel for your business? Or maybe you are part of the evolving trend of operating out of a virtual office. If any of these categories describes you, an office space would be one of your preeminent needs now and then, right?

The standard practice is to resort to a quick fix – a cafe, or a hotel. Both have their drawbacks; coffee shops can be noisy and crowded, and hotels, expensive. Moreover, you risk over-caffeinating yourself, coffee shops after all are commercial places, and hotel infrastructure is usually not geared for office requirements. Whether you’re a startup or a business traveler, ideally you would want a professional, functional, workplace. This is where BreathingRoom could be your go-to option.

Founded by Kaushal Sanghavi and Mehernosh Bathena, BreathingRoom gives you the flexibility of getting an office room, on demand. Be it for meetings, conferences, training sessions, recruitments, or just to do your work at a desk, from wherever, and whenever, at short notice, for as short a period as just an hour, or just a day, according to your needs. And it won’t cost you a bomb.

The prices range from INR 79 (US$ 1.18) an hour for single seater hot desks, to INR 399 (US$ 5.98) an hour meeting rooms for four to six people, to INR 599 (US$ 8.98) an hour for boardrooms and training rooms that seat 8 to 14 and 15 plus, respectively. And they come equipped with free wifi, whiteboards, projector/LED display, air conditioning, plus tea and coffee.

The BreathingRoom app is available on Android and iOS devices. For now, their services are available in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, and Delhi.

A room with a view

Needless to say, I wanted to try out booking a BreathingRoom for myself. The app, even for a non-geek like me, turned out to be pretty easy to use. All I needed to do was install it, login with my Facebook or LinkedIn, which is done to verify identity – you are assured that they’ll never post to Facebook on your behalf. Once the app opens, you can browse through photos of BreathingRooms, along with the specifics of each, such as the location, size, cost, and amenities. Once you pick one, you tap the ‘book now’ button, choose your time slot, make your payment, and that’s it.

As for owners of office spaces, there’s a ‘got space’ option on the BreathingRoom site where you can list your space for free.

While the photos of the BreathingRooms were picture perfect on the app, I wanted to check out one for myself. When Kaushal heard I was a yoga buff, he thought he had the perfect one for me in Koregaon Park – a facility, which is a wellness center, conducting meditation, spiritual healing, self empowerment workshops, and so on, and lets out its space to BreathingRoom. So there was my yoga connect.

Off I trotted to Koregaon Park on Sunday. But first, let me tell you a little about Koregaon Park. About fifteen years back, when I moved to Pune, Koregaon Park – called KP for short – was my first address in the city. KP was a tranquil crisscross of tree-lined lanes and bylanes, where old Parsi bungalows nestled. With hardly any traffic, the air you breathed was morning dew fresh, filled with birdsong, and the few people who moseyed along the lanes were genial Parsis or the maroon-robed Oshoites from the Osho commune located in KP – it used to be called Rajneesh ashram those days.

Today, the lanes and bylanes of KP still exist, the trees still cling to the sidewalks, but share space with eateries, cafes, microbreweries, myriad shops, offices, mushrooming apartment complexes, and so on, which have sprouted up – in short, a reflection of Pune transforming from what used to be a sleepy pensioners’ paradise to a burgeoning young metropolis.

Discontent spurs inventiveness

The matchmaking

Competition is good all around