For five months, Maya Kachroo-Levine and her husband worked 12 hours a day from their home in Los Angeles. “We were in desperate need of a change of scenery, and we’d always dreamed of owning a bungalow with a pool in Palm Springs, but impulse buying a second home wasn’t entirely within our budget,” she said.
Instead, the couple booked three separate Airbnb apartments in Palm Springs — one each for August, September and October — for mini-"works." “It’s amazing what spending four days a month in a different house does for your mental state,” says the 29-year-old freelance travel writer, copywriter and freelance writer. A swimming pool doesn't hurt either.
After months of safer-at-home restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, people's desire for a change of scenery has led to an increase in work or working holidays. There's no one-size-fits-all approach: people work with partners or small groups of friends, and travel over long weekends, weeks, a month or more. It doesn't hurt that more than 33% of Americans are still working from home, with an additional 25% working remotely part-time due to the coronavirus, according to a Gallup poll; meanwhile, tech giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google have Announcing the extension of the WFH program through summer 2021. In fact, 82% of companies surveyed by research and advisory firm Gartner said they plan to offer remote work at least part of the time after the pandemic is over.
Recent Airbnb survey data shows that people with the ability and flexibility to work from anywhere are actively booking longer stays (trips of more than two weeks). The hard-hit hospitality and tourism industries are also embracing the trend. For example, Hyatt Hotels recently launched Work From Hyatt extended-stay packages at 90 hotels in North America and the Caribbean. Internationally, the Aruba Tourism Board’s new “Happy Work” program allows visitors to stay for up to three months; Antigua and Barbuda’s Nomad Digital Residence program will host remote workers for up to two years; Go to Visitors to Barbados can apply for a "Stamp of Welcome" visa to work remotely on the island for up to one year.
However, most remote workers simply DIY their jobs out of convenience and security. According to a survey by AAA, the vast majority (80%) of travel this fall will be road trips, allowing travel decisions to be made on the fly. (AAA found that one in five people planning to travel before the end of the year expect to do so within a week of travel.)
Jenny Wang, a 30-year-old publicist in Washington, D.C., recently left the city with three friends to work in the sleepy rural town of Dale Mountain, New York. The four women shared a 700-square-foot cabin for six days at $100 a night.
“We talk every morning about who has an important call, who needs a private room, or who is in class,” she said. From there, they coordinated the workspace (with a bedroom, a loft area, main area and outdoor picnic table). Since Wang's job requires constant phone calls, she positioned herself in the tiny enclosed entrance of the cabin, rolled a heater inside to keep warm, and sat on the floor with her laptop on a bench.
“I’m more productive than when I was working from home alone,” she said. "I love being around people, and I'm not someone who's easily distracted. It's actually energizing to be in a new space."
"Work is a great excuse for all of us to get outside on the deck or take a short walk. It reminds me that this is normal and not chained to a desk all day ."
Having other people around also makes it easier to set work-life boundaries, with nearly half of Americans working longer hours admitting to struggling with this since the pandemic began, according to a JDP survey.
Nicole Nichols, 33, a senior director of research at a consulting firm, and her husband left Boston in August to work in the Berkshires for a week with another couple. “It’s essentially a work-from-home experience,” she said. “We have phone calls and meetings every day, and then around 5 p.m., we have happy hour and start cooking.”
While their daily routines aren't much different than what they do at home, there's one welcome change: "When I was working from home normally, I barely got any proper breaks," Nichols said. "But work is a great excuse for all of us to get outside on the deck or take a walk. It reminds me that this is normal and not being chained to a desk all day — I need my friend in the next room to remind me that I should stay away Cell phones and computers.”
Time away from screens is a key element of work. It’s not just about introducing new contexts to your Zoom calls, it’s about maximizing what you can do in your off-duty hours. For Emilie Berman, 25, the public relations and marketing coordinator for The Knot in New York, working with her boyfriend was an opportunity to explore another part of the country without having to move.
The couple booked one-way flights to Denver and rented a Denver Airbnb for a month — using Denver as a base to visit Colorado destinations such as Beaver Creek, Vail, Aspen, Boulder and Colorado Springs other towns in the state—and rented a car for two months. "We're still working on the East Coast, so we get up early, do eight or so hours of work, and finish by 4 p.m. Then, we still have time before sunset to go hiking and explore whatever town we're going to. Come in at night ,"she says.
After leaving Colorado, the couple drove through Utah to visit national parks, then headed south to Arizona and then west to Los Angeles. Staying productive during a long trip like this can be a challenge, but that's where PTO comes in. “Neither of us has really used a ton of vacation time because of the pandemic,” Berman said. “We can take Fridays off here and there, and recently we took Wednesday through Friday off to go off the grid in a little house in Utah.”
Until recently, the idea of becoming a digital nomad or embracing a laptop lifestyle has been reserved only for influencers and those with the most flexible work setups. But in a year that has felt like a waste for many, combining business with travel has provided people with much-needed escapism. “As crazy as 2020 has been,” Berman said, “we feel very lucky that we were able to at least make the best of a bad situation.”
