Phone booth or meeting pod: which does your office need?

Same product, different jobs

Phone booth, office pod, acoustic pod and soundproof booth are mostly names for the same thing. The difference that matters is size. A phone booth usually means the one-person size, built for calls and focused work. A meeting pod seats two or four, for conversations that need more than one person in the room. In this range the Solo Pod is the phone booth, and the Duo and Team pods are meeting pods. All three share the same acoustic rating, up to 25 dB (±3 dB), so the choice is about who uses them, not how quiet they are.

Start by watching the floor for a week

Before choosing sizes, count what actually happens. Three things are worth noting:

• Who leaves their desk to take a call, and where they go: a stairwell, a pantry, an empty meeting room.
• How your meeting rooms are used. If a six-seat room is regularly booked by one person on a video call, you are short of booths, not rooms.
• Which conversations get postponed because there is nowhere private to have them: performance reviews, interviews, client calls.

On most floors, the largest share of private conversations is one person on a call. That is the case for phone booths. The conversations that need two or four people happen less often but cannot happen in a booth at all, which is the case for a meeting pod.

Signs you need phone booths

• People take calls in corridors, stairwells or the pantry.
• Meeting rooms are booked out by one person at a time.
• Video calls on the open floor disturb the people sitting nearby.
• People need an hour of focused work and have nowhere to go for it.

Signs you need a meeting pod

• Interviews, 1:1s and HR conversations are held in a glass room everyone can see into, or not held at all.
• Two people regularly join the same client call from one laptop.
• Small huddles of three or four take over a big boardroom, or happen standing around a desk.
• You need a place to take a visitor without walking them across the whole floor.

The space arithmetic

Pod	Seats	Floor area	Per seat
Solo	1	1.10 m²	1.10 m²
Duo	2	2.14 m²	1.07 m²
Team	4	3.61 m²	0.90 m²

Per seat, the bigger pods use less floor. That only holds if the seats are filled. A Team Pod used by one person on a call is 3.61 m² doing the job of a Solo Pod in 1.10 m², and it is unavailable to the four people who needed it in the meantime. The useful figure is cost per conversation the pod actually hosts, which is why the week of watching comes first.

How Philippine pricing is quoted, and what sits outside the pod price, is on the pricing page.

Most offices end up with a mix

The common pattern is several Solo Pods placed close to the people who make calls all day, and one Duo or Team Pod for the conversations that need a table. Pods can be added one at a time and moved later, so there is no need to get the final mix right on day one. Start with what the week of watching showed you and add to it.

To see the three sizes against each other, or to find out how many fit on your floor, use the size comparator and floor planner.