Rachel Coleman is a private college counselor, helping high school students with their applications for admission and financial aid.
Her clients live across the United States. But Coleman, 31, a Maine native, works from all over the world.
Before sitting down at her desk each day and communicating with her students, “I wake up in the morning and go on a hike or go to a museum,” said Coleman, who was in Xàbia, Spain, for two months between a three-month stint in China and her next destination: Budapest, where she planned to spend another three months.
Coleman is part of the next evolution of working from home: working remotely while traveling the globe.
“I want to be a good worker,” she said. “But I also want to live a life I find meaningful and valuable.”
A new wave of adventurers is doing more than just extending work trips or living temporarily on the road. They’re leaving behind their full-time addresses altogether and clocking in remotely from short-term rentals, Airbnbs, or RVs.
Some are bringing along their kids, home-schooling or enrolling them in online schools. An entire industry of services has popped up to support them, from virtual receptionists to work-from-hotel packages, specialized insurance, and international networks of coworking spaces. About 60 countries now offer long-term visas for visitors who want to work from them remotely.
“It’s growing tremendously,” said Peter Murphy Lewis, a former CNN foreign affairs correspondent who now works as an entrepreneur and head of growth at the investment platform WebStreet while traveling with his wife and home-schooled 7-year-old son.
“It always comes out as negative when you say you don’t want to be tied to something,” Lewis said from Paris, where he was preparing to head off to Brussels and then Glasgow before settling in for three months in Brazil. “But there is something about the freedom of not being tied down to a physical location that makes me feel more fulfilled.”
Lewis spends six months a year working from the road, where he stays with relatives or friends or in Airbnbs or the occasional hotel, takes calls in cafés, airport lounges, cars, and quiet corners of public libraries, and once made a major presentation from a small-town ice cream parlor that had good wifi.
“I’ve turned the world into my office,” Lewis said.
He traces his passion for travel to his time in a private boarding school where one-third of the students were international. But what really got him started was a nearly fatal brush with illness 14 years ago. “Faced with the terrifying unknown of a life-threatening diagnosis, I did what any sane person would do,” Lewis said: “I bought a motorcycle and decided to ride across America.”
Ruminations on mortality like that push many workers out into the world.
“We’ve had people in our lives who got sick and died before retirement,” said Jessica Schmidt, a full-time working traveler. Then the COVID-19 pandemic “made us realize that life is short and things can be taken away at the drop of a hat.”
So Schmidt and her husband, Justin, quit their corporate jobs — she was a lawyer for Amazon and he was a business systems analyst — and set out on the road. They started their own travel advice company, Uprooted Traveler, which they run from an RV they’d just driven from Key West to McCarthy, Alaska.
The Schmidts work normal work weeks, checking weather forecast to pick the best two days out of seven to take off and explore.
Some people ask them how the couple could have given up well-paying careers for an itinerant existence, Schmidt said over an intermittent satellite connection from the wilderness.
“I do get that question,” she said. “And on the other hand people will say, ‘You’re living the dream.’ In full transparency, we obviously make less than we did in our corporate jobs. But we live comfortably and we’ve had all these experiences we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to have.”
Like Lewis and the Schmidts, these new wandering workers aren’t just people who are starting out and trying to find themselves. More senior executives are heading into the world.
“Sometimes people with high net worth, even ultra-high net worth, begin to realize that what matters most is not material,” said Rebecca Fielding, CEO of the high-end London-based travel agency The Conte Club, which often handles the logistics for C-suite types who want to work while traveling for long periods or full time.
She’s had working clients who went along when their daughter studied abroad, for instance, Fielding said.
“We need to find the logistics that work for them. Sometimes it’s as simple as space or Wi-fi or a meeting room.”
Luxury travel providers have also seen an uptick in long-duration business trips that overlap with big events such as Super Bowls, the Kentucky Derby and Taylor Swift concerts; the international Flight Centre Travel Group reports that business travel to Paris this summer that happened to coincide with the Olympics went up 88 percent over the same period last year.
“It’s not just people who have nontraditional roles” who are working from the world, Schmidt said.
Concierge services have cropped up that specialize in arranging logistics for these travelers; virtual receptionists such as those at Conversational take care of their administrative tasks and there’s new cross-border travel insurance for them, too, such as SafetyWing. PostFromUS forwards packages and other mail.
The booking platform Selina lists accommodations with shared work areas in 110 destinations. Coworking offices including Regus and WeWork All Access offer subscriptions for customers to use locations anywhere they go. And hotels are offering new services for working guests and discounts for longer stays.
“Flexibility and connectivity have become the most important factors,” said Silvia Lupone, owner of the four-unit Stingray Villa in Cozumel, which has added high-speed wifi, workspaces and check-in and check-out times that sync with work hours in different time zones.
Some working travelers prefer to take their own homes with them. Many new RVs now come with workspaces and Wi-fi infrastructure. Nearly half of visitors to Kampgrounds of America campsites work while camping, the company found in a survey. “Wi-fi has become one of the most sought-after amenities our campers look for,” said Diane Eichler, senior vice president of marketing.
The other impact COVID had was to speed up the adoption of technology that makes remote work possible from almost anywhere. Now more services are being made available to tailor that technology to working travelers, from online calendars that reschedule appointments if flights are delayed to meet-up apps like WiFi Tribe and Nomad List for workers on the road.
Those communities can be a comfort to people who spend long stretches traveling, said Peter Murphy Lewis.
“Finding like-minded people who just don’t fit into the social norms of having a house and buying a car,” he said, “gives us something to make us feel not so odd.”
Jon Marcus can be reached at [email protected].
This post was originally published on here
