Working From a Tropical Island Is the New Work From Home Trend
In the new world of work, there’s a new type of employee: The business-leisure traveler. It’s the latest attempt to find a happy medium between working arrangements like Airbnb Inc.’s — where staff can work anywhere, anytime — and those at companies like Tesla Inc., whose chief executive officer Elon Musk tweeted that unless employees turn up in the office, “we will assume you have resigned.”
Business-leisure travelers are a subset of digital nomads, living and working abroad for longer than a typical holiday without taking up permanent residence. They usually spend weeks or months overseas before returning home, while other nomads may spend years on the road.
David Abraham realized there was a market for this type of ultra-remote working while at his laptop in a Tokyo Starbucks. When he noticed the customers around him were working too, he asked himself “why couldn’t they be in an amazing place like Bali?” Abraham now runs Outpost, a company that provides temporary living-working spaces in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.
Employees’ growing enthusiasm for business-leisure travel is slowly being met with policy momentum. Governments are trying to work out visa and tax regulations while businesses fret about compliance and corporate culture.
Officials in tourism hotspots Thailand and Indonesia see the longer-term travel trend working in their favor — if everyone can get the rules right.
On the Indonesian island of Bukabuka, a four-hour-plus journey by airplane and boat from the capital city of Jakarta, eco resort Reconnect is seeing a surge in inquiries from foreigners. Now that borders have reopened, overseas visitors with plans to work remotely are booking sojourns of anywhere between a month and half a year.
The resort features
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