Why The Digital Nomad Accommodation Problem Needs to Be Solved

I’ve been a Digital Nomad since 2001, when I launched my lifestyle business I later came to call the “Airbnb before Airbnb”.
When the first online booking website I created began to properly work (it was designed for private apartment rentals in Prague), I found myself free to work online and travel the world.
And soon I came to realize I needed a place to work.
Forget co-workings or rooms with internet connection: they didn’t exist.
It was also hard to book a place to live online, even more so for long periods.
I often landed in Bali, stayed in a Guest House, rented a bike and started roaming the island looking for a house.
The process would take a week in average.
Fast forward 17 years and things have improved sensibly: you can now book houses with internet connection, go in a co-working or work comfortably from many digital nomads friendly cafès.
But, amazingly, it’s still hard to book a compatible apartment online for a month or more.
Why? Is it Airbnb’s fault?
I don’t think so. In fact Airbnb has a (not very well known) Sublets section:

What is really missing in many cities are the compatibile listings.
I mean, the listings are there, but are hard to book.
What’s wrong with them?
Well, imagine yourself trying to book a place in Rome for two months.
You will find several apartments but before booking you need to be 100% sure this is exactly the place you need, right?
You’re staying 2 months after all and if something is wrong, you’ll have a huge problem.
Here’s some of the issues you’ll find:
- Price
often Hosts apply a small discount for monthly stays. If the price is 100 U$ a night, they apply a discount on 3000 U$.
They rarely compare how much they really made in the same month the previous year.
If they did they’d often discover that they didn’t make 3000, but probably 2500 as it’s usually rare to get every single night booked.
After that they should consider the fact that the work involved with filling 25 nights with many different guests was considerable.
Every single guest, even if she stays just one night, requires communication, check-in, cleaning and support.
Having one single guest for months at the time reduces the amount of work considerably, so it often makes sense to offer a better deal.
This if course depends on the season and the city but in general we found this to be true. - Internet speed
Digital Nomads and remote workers need fast and reliable internet connection.
They have different needs according to their actual work.
Some are constantly on calls, others are ok with slower speeds.
But they all know what they need.
And they almost never find this information in the listings.
You can see “Wifi — Continuous access in the listing” but you know that means nothing.
Very often this means a mobile GSM based solution which is fast for a while and then goes down to unusable speeds.
A remote worker needs to know this is real unlimited broadband and the exact download and upload speed.
This is really hard to find and it requires a lot of back-and-forth communication with several Hosts.
Basically internet connection is not like the hot water: it’s not enough to say that you have it in your listing. - A Comfortable place to work
For a remote worker the apartment is not just a place to stay: it’s an office.
As a bare minimum they need a comfortable office chair and a dedicated table/desk.
Again, Airbnb tried to solve the problem with a checkbox “Laptop friendly workspace: a table or desk with space for a laptop and a chair that’s comfortable to work in”, but this is often abused by Hosts who think the plastic kitchen chair is fine for several hours of work.
In this case we can check the pictures, but this is also a lot of work.
What is missing if verified data which can be used in search.
There’s many more aspects which need to be improved and I have studied them extensively in the years, with online surveys and in recent travels in Chiang Mai (Thailand), one of the world capitals for Digital Nomads.
Digital Nomads there practically begged us to solve this problem as it would make their lives so much easier.

We believe there is a lot to be done, and although Airbnb could theoretically solve the problem, it probably lacks the focus and the willingness to do it.
Also, we are also convinced this is not a niche: it’s a completely new market with several niches itself and it requires a dedicated approach, rules and ecosystem.
This kind of guest is the Digital Nomad / Remote Worker.
Digital Nomads are the category of guest most hurt by the Airbnb approach.
Many of us in the Trips Community are Digital Nomads.
(And besides Digital Nomads, the use cases for monthly stays are many more.)
We’ll get to them in further articles.
We are 100% committed to solving this problem: we want to involve the Digital Nomads community on one side and help Hosts to upgrade their businesses on the other.
These are two worlds which do not communicate, nor know each other, very much.
We’ll be the bridge.
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