The digital nomad life: combining work and travel
On a recent afternoon in Medellín, Colombia, a group of 22 out-oftowners gathered to brainstorm and then met up with locals.
They weren’t on vacation. Nor had they met by coincidence. They were participants in a program run by Unsettled, a startup that organizes 30-day co-working experiences around the world for creative people, entrepreneurs and other professionals seeking to combine work, travel and redefining themselves.
The company is one of dozens of new work-tourism programs that aim to help workers known as digital nomads navigate living and working in far-off places.
“If we could be somewhere, experiencing the world in a beautiful setting while working, challenging ourselves, growing professionally, enjoying a community of likeminded people and connecting locally, what’s stopping us?” said Michael Youngblood, who founded Unsettled with another digital nomad, Jonathan Kalan.
The name Unsettled “is about turning something perceived as a negative into a positive,” Kalan said. “Everybody feels unsettled at some point. If you’re unsettled by a 9-to-5 job, then why not embrace the uncertainty?”
The concept resonated with Stacey Chassoulas, a digital marketer from Johannesburg. She joined Unsettled’s program in Buenos Aires in the fall “to change the rhythms of daily life” and test the waters of remote work with her partner, Tyrone Niland. Both are 36 and love to travel, but wanted to keep their jobs and home.
“I wanted to see if it was a lifestyle that would mesh with the corporate world,” said Niland, a partner at Bramel Business Solutions, a small private equity advisory firm.
“Concepts like Unsettled are very new to South Africa’s professional environment,” but his company was supportive “as long as I could take phone calls and respond to emails,” he said.
Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, an independent research and consulting firm, said combining work and travel was not new, but interest has been increasing. “We still don’t know how many digital nomads there are,” he said. “It’s hard to measure, but it’s pretty clearly growing at a strong rate.”
He attributed the increase in the number of remote workers to improved technology, a changing job market and inexpensive flights.
The two main groups fuelling it, he said, are millennials interested in taking time off from traditional work and aging baby boomers who have financial resources and flexibility.
“Humans are social beings,” King said. “It’s not easy to penetrate foreign cultures, so help in that process is hugely important.”
Roam, a network of co-living properties in Miami, Bali, Madrid, London and eight additional places by the end of the year, is geared to remote workers “who need a reliable base in different cities,” said Bruno Haid, the company’s chief executive. Each location has communal living areas, with meeting rooms, a co-working space and fast Wi-Fi, and offers social activities, often unique to the locale.
“It offers a much deeper sense of the local experience and is more affordable than most traditional hotels and apartments,” Haid said. (Costs start at $1,800 a month and $500 a week.) He compared Roam to extended-stay hotels popular with business travelers, but with a stronger focus on community and design.
Most guests are “freelancers, authors and creative industry types,” he said, but “we do increasingly see employees” from companies like Google or the Boston Consulting Group.