🧭 Travel: Explore more by mixing remote work with travel

Combining remote work with travel, can change how you navigate the world

A change of scenery is as good as a break, is how the old adage goes. I love to travel the world as much as I love to explore my local autonomous community - Aragon, in Spain. Sometimes even only a day of exploring my own “backyard” can be refreshing and facilitate a total reset in my energy and approach. Are you embracing the opportunity to combine remote work with travel?

It often surprises how many people I speak to that only consider remote work as something you do from fixed places that are OFFICES, for example their home office, client’s or company site but for us, our family, it means more opportunities to explore and spend quality family time together!

All types of travel - No matter what the duration of local exploring - a day, a long weekend, a week or multiple months via an extended work-travel plan - travel can mean so many things to different people. Wikipedia defines it as:

Travel can be done by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, aeroplane, ship or other means, with or without luggage, and can be one way or round trip. Travel can also include relatively short stays.

After the pandemic, some of us are STILL rekindling our connection with travel, as regions and borders opened up and people began to explore again. From planning a day-trip or long weekend to organising a longer journey of exploring, many different types of trips are possible.

Ways to extend travel trips - The times of traveling only when on holidays are long gone: thanks to the shift to remote work, we also have the potential to extend our trips while working. Freelancers, contractors, and digital nomads already embrace this type of mixture of work and travel, as they generally can choose where they work. 

Now, as more companies support remote work (and not just working from home) some will enable workers to travel locally, regionally or more extensively - supporting various amounts of days of travel. 

Such flexibility in work hour scheduling or online “office” hours, opens up various models to consider:

• Locally - some home workers can work from more than one location in their local area, therefore enabling county or country travel opening up the possibility of day trips or long weekend getaways. You could travel to a location on a Thursday evening, work from a local cafe on a Friday and then have extra time for your weekend trip.

  As a family who use remote work to extend our holiday time, we go on many skiing and snowboarding trips to the Spanish Pyrenees, we have many happy memories from the slopes on long weekends during the ski season, pictured below!

  

• Regionally - some workers can work regionally or within an economic area - for example some companies in Europe support up to 30 or 90 days of remote working within the EU geographical zone. Check with your employment contract, policy document or HR contact to be sure

• Further afield with more choice in destinations - in some cases, flexibility is not only allowed but encouraged: this is the case of the recently announced Airbnb’s policy, giving the flexibility to live and work in 170 countries for up to 90 days a year in each location.

Multiple benefits, for individuals and locations - For the individual, combining travelling and working has its plus points: change of location, exploring new places, combining travel with working, novel experiences, meeting new people, supporting new communities, and, for many, better wellness can be found in the simple act of changing location you work from, to freshen up your perspective and productivity. 

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There are also benefits to the local communities we travel to, bringing new visitors, spending in the location and revitalising local communities via tourism. Also, an interesting trend is extended travel stays and new digital nomad visas offered by locations, which emerged during the pandemic. This can reap benefits for all, boosting local economies with an injection of well needed spending power.

Now you have considered the reasons why we should travel, how to potentially incorporate and extend remote working into that trip and the associated benefits, all that there is left to ask is - where are you planning next? 

Read more about our family family travels here. Or why not meet Han, Juliana and Charlie, all digital nomads with fantastic stories to share!