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🧐📘 Airbnb leans on Wayviator for thought leadership on the future of work

Júlia Chassot

Sep 22, 2022 — 4 min read

Here's a preview of the remote work news we are covering this week:

🧐📘 We'll take it: Airbnb quoted us in their latest paper — say what?
🏘🌴 NomadX is expanding to 4 new locations (including Brazil)
💨🕊Could remote work give climate migrants and refugees economic stability?

🧐📘 We'll take it: Airbnb quoted us in their latest paper — say what?

Well, this doesn't happen every day. So after what must surely be over a dozen instances of me quoting and reporting on Airbnb's public thoughts on the future of remote work, they decided to return the favor.

Sort of.

Airbnb published a new policy paper called 'Airbnb Guide to Live and Work Anywhere'.

We'll talk about some of the details of the paper in just a moment—but indulge me in a bit of back-patting on one key point.

On Page 2 (not counting the cover page), they kick off the thesis of their entire article with a quotation about the future of communities and employment.

“Cities used to have to depend on the power of... local employers, local jobs, and local industries when promoting their region as a place to live and work. Now, the source of jobs and income has been radically uncoupled from literal physical proximity. Any town or region can promote itself as a great place to live — on its own merits.”

And, you know, I thought that that sounded a bit familiar. Luckily, there was a footnote at the bottom of the page that indicated the source of this smart-sounding quote.

And what do you know?

A citation from Airbnb for little ol' Wayviator.com.

(That's me! I said that!)

Anyway, check out the paper if you are interested in reading more.

A few things that are covered that might be of interest to our readers:

How communities can and should target remote workers specifically and intentionally (as distinct from tourists)
How tax jurisdictions should work proactively with corporations and individuals to clear the fog on grey areas like permanent establishment liabilities
Specific examples of cities and countries that are promoting themselves as remote work destinations
Tangible policy strategies that locations can take to attract remote workers

🏘🌴 NomadX is expanding to three new locations (and why their CEO thinks villages > cities)

NomadX and its CEO Gonçalo Hall are famously pioneering digital nomad villages around the world. They started in Portugal, have expanded to Brazil, and now have a total of four locations that are live or almost live.

For instance, in the Portuguese-speaking African nation of Cabo Verde, NomadX offers an all-inclusive package starting at €600 a month for a co-living setup (a shared living environment where people have their own bedrooms but shared facilities), and ranging up to €800 a month for a studio apartment.

It may not be cheap to fly there, and it may not be for everyone, but this package certainly boasts a monthly cost of living that could be attractive to some.

In tracking Gonçalo's and NomadX's strategy and philosophy over the last few years, we've seen time and again how they are making decisions based on a specific and opinionated point of view.

They are betting that villages will be just as important or more important than cities to the future of remote work communities.

When we talk about the future of remote work, we do tend to think of national policy, regions, and cities.

NomadX is intentionally and explicitly pursuing a development strategy around community-oriented villages.

Real villages. Places where only a few thousand people live full-time.

As Gonçalo will tell you over and over — it's all about community.

So Brazil's first nomad village is being developed in a small beach town in the North — not in São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.

Smaller, more remote Madeira island was the site for the first village in Portugal — not bustling urban hubs in Lisbon and Porto.

This approach reflects an anthropological and sociological concept that might be as old as human history itself — human-scale communities are not natural or ideal at the scale of million-person megalopolis. Tribes and communities existed for thousands of years on orders of magnitude much lower: in the dozens, hundreds, and thousands at most.

Maybe that's just a better way to live.

Maybe the remote work future will result in a million new and revitalized village-scale communities — not embedded within the great cities of the Industrial and Information Ages but in smaller and more varied locations across urban and rural environments worldwide.

💨🕊Could remote work give climate migrants and refugees economic stability?

We've talked about how many Ukrainians have stabilized their disrupted lives by finding remote work positions and destinations — while their traditional homes and offices are under attack.

Former Evernote CEO and cofounders are betting that this particular situation is indicative of a larger opportunity to help relocate displaced people, leveraging the freedom and power of remote work.

They have formed Sora Union (note: not an actual labor union) to recruit people specifically from countries that might be overlooked by typical recruiting and job placement firms.

Remote could be a game-changing economic lifeline to millions of people around the world, just as it may affect other groups of people (positively or negatively) in different walks of life.