Two months ago, Wise bought Expatica. A company built around moving money across borders decided it also wanted a website used by people trying to work out how to move themselves across borders. Once you get past the press release, the reason is rather revealing.

On 18 June, Wise acquired Expatica, and I confess that when I first saw the news my reaction was less “interesting strategic acquisition” and more WHY, WISE, WHYYYYYY?

Not because there is anything particularly strange about either company. Wise is the fintech founded in London in 2011 as TransferWise, originally built around the extremely attractive proposition that perhaps moving your own money from one country to another should not require sacrificing a small goat to the banking system. It has since become a much broader international financial platform, with accounts, cards, business services and the ability to hold more than 40 currencies. In its 2026 financial year it served around 19 million active customers and processed more than $240 billion in cross-border transactions, so we are some distance from a couple of irritated Estonians trying to save money on bank charges.

Expatica is a very different animal, although anyone who has actually moved country will probably have landed there sooner or later. Founded in 2000, it publishes practical information for people living abroad: visas, housing, healthcare, tax, jobs, banking, education, insurance and the glorious catalogue of administrative inconveniences that nobody thinks about while browsing photographs of a Tuscan farmhouse but which becomes remarkably important three weeks after buying one. Wise says Expatica received more than seven million visits in 2025, particularly from readers in France, Germany, Portugal and Spain.

So why would Wise want it?

The official answer is perfectly respectable. People moving internationally have complicated financial lives, Expatica helps them navigate those lives, Wise already serves many of them and therefore the two businesses fit together. Wise even says, with admirable lack of mystery, that expats are among its most important customer groups and that it plans to expand Expatica’s content, local coverage, markets and languages.

All true, but the interesting part is what sits underneath that explanation, because Wise has effectively bought itself a chair beside people several months before many of them start moving serious amounts of money.

Nobody wakes up one Tuesday and unexpectedly transfers €180,000 to Italy. There is usually a prehistory involving searches about residency, healthcare, property, schools, tax numbers, rental contracts, pensions, mortgages, cars and whether somebody will please explain why a document required to obtain another document can only be issued once you already possess the second document. Expatica lives inside that prehistory.

This makes the acquisition rather more interesting than a fintech buying a media site because it fancied having some content.

Someone researching how to relocate to Portugal is not simply a reader interested in Portugal. They may soon rent a house, move a salary, convert savings, take out insurance, pay a deposit, open accounts, employ an accountant and begin making regular payments in a currency that was previously useful mainly for holidays. Someone researching retirement in Spain may eventually move a pension every month for twenty years. Someone relocating a company director to Germany brings an employer, expenses, banking requirements and possibly a family. Someone buying a house in Italy may discover, with touching innocence, that buying the house was actually the inexpensive part.

We internationals are very good at describing all this in romantic terms. We are mobile. We have chosen freedom. We have escaped geographical convention. We belong everywhere. We work from wherever we want, although “wherever we want” very often turns out to involve three tax advisers, two SIM cards and a small collection of chargers no longer compatible with anything we own.

From the perspective of a financial company, however, our philosophical relationship with borders is probably less important than the fact that we keep crossing them with money.

And quite a lot of money, apparently.

Expatica’s advertising material describes an audience of which 82% is university educated, with an average income of €91,000 and a median age between 28 and 37. Those are Expatica’s own commercial audience figures, so one should not confuse them with an international census, but they do explain why a company selling cross-border financial services might find the readership slightly more interesting than, say, acquiring a website devoted to people who collect novelty teaspoons.

There is a broader point here about the endless argument over what to call us. Digital nomads, expats, migrants, international professionals, remote workers, foreign residents, second-home owners, global citizens and, my personal favourite, people who simply cannot remember which country their good pair of shoes is currently in.

These categories matter socially and legally, of course, but commercially they are increasingly becoming variations of the same phenomenon: people whose income, assets, families, work or everyday expenditure no longer sit neatly inside a single national system.

For years much of the discussion around digital nomadism and international living has concentrated on laptops beside swimming pools, visas, lifestyle and which small Mediterranean town will become “the next” whatever. The financial industry has the advantage of being less romantic. It can see the transfers.

A person permanently established in one country can be a perfectly good banking customer. A person earning in Britain, living in Italy, paying a mortgage in Spain, invoicing a client in America and periodically wondering what happened to the money left in a Dutch account in 2019 is, from the right angle, an entire small financial ecosystem.

This may also explain why content is becoming strategically interesting again. Expatica does not merely attract people interested in living abroad; it attracts them precisely when they are about to make decisions. There is an enormous commercial difference between somebody casually reading about Lisbon and somebody searching “how to open Portuguese bank account non-resident” at 1.17 in the morning with seventeen browser tabs open and a property deposit due on Friday.

That person does not need inspiration. That person needs things.

Wise has understood the value of being around at that moment.

There is an obvious question about what happens when the company that provides the financial services also owns part of the information environment people use when deciding which financial services they need. This does not automatically make the information less useful, and Expatica already operated commercially with advertisers and partners, but editorial trust becomes even more important when the owner has products sitting directly beside the subjects being explained. Turning every article into a long and elaborate route towards a Wise account would be commercially tempting and editorially suicidal, because the useful thing Wise has actually bought is not a pile of webpages but the fact that people believe those webpages may help them.

Still, I rather like what the acquisition says about us.

For all the mildly ridiculous language surrounding global mobility, there is now a serious economy developing around people who live across borders, and the businesses paying attention are beginning to treat them less as tourists who stayed too long and more as a distinct, valuable and recurring market.

Wise is not betting on people moving once. It is betting on people whose international life continues after the removal van has left, because salaries keep arriving, bills keep departing, currencies keep changing and families continue producing financial complications with impressive reliability.

Which makes the acquisition of Expatica rather logical after all.

It also leaves those of us at NOMAG with a comforting thought. We spend an unreasonable amount of time researching internationally mobile people, interviewing them, writing about them and occasionally living exactly the sort of administratively questionable lives we describe.

Until recently, one could have mistaken this for journalism.

Apparently it is an acquisition target.

So, Wise, should you happen to be reading this, we would merely like to point out that NOMAG is extremely relaxed about strategic investment, sponsorship, partnership, acquisition and most other arrangements involving numbers with enough zeroes.

We have principles, naturally.

But we also live internationally, so we accept several currencies.

We Put the Main Digital Nomad Research on One Table. That’s When We Understood What Makes Ours Unique.

Cities want them, companies sell to them, governments create visas for them and researchers try to understand them. We compared some of the most recent studies - and discovered that “digital nomad” may now describe several rather different people.

Digital nomads have had a remarkably busy few years. First they were people with laptops who happened to move around. Then they became a tourism segment, a housing market, a visa category, a rural regeneration strategy and, occasionally, the answer to whatever problem happened to be on a municipality’s PowerPoint that morning.

Everybody seems to want them. The slightly awkward question is: which ones?

While preparing AT LAST, ITALY… AT LEAST TEMPORARILY, we went back through some of the most relevant recent research. Not to find studies that agreed with NOMAG, but to understand who everybody else was actually talking about.

MBO Partners looks at the phenomenon through the American workforce and shows how digital nomadism has moved well beyond the freelance fringe: employees are now a major part of the population, although its audience remains heavily Gen Z and Millennial and is gradually moving towards longer, slower stays. Flatio comes at the same world through accommodation: its respondents tend to stay one to four months, and finding somewhere suitable to live is one of their biggest frustrations. FlexJobs starts even further upstream, with thousands of US professionals who can work from anywhere — interestingly, only a minority say they actually want the fully nomadic, constantly moving version of the lifestyle.

Fiverr studied 2,000 “Anywhere Workers” across six countries, including Italy, and gives us one of the clearest signals that Italy is already genuinely attractive: it appears among the most popular countries to visit. The Social Hub’s European research, meanwhile, puts much more emphasis on community, loneliness and belonging — entirely logical for the audience it reaches. Its study includes Italy, although its Italy-specific figures concern Italian digital nomads rather than foreigners considering moving here.

Nomads.com — formerly Nomad List — offers something different again: a very large, live platform population already moving between destinations, useful for understanding incomes and the relative appeal of individual cities. bunq broadens the picture towards international living, financial confidence, wellbeing, healthcare and bureaucracy. InterNations looks at people who have already made the move abroad — and its Italy findings are a useful reminder that loving a country and enjoying its administration are not necessarily the same hobby. Italy performs particularly poorly on bureaucracy and administrative essentials.

Then there are the destination and policy studies. Global Citizen Solutions compares 64 jurisdictions and places Italy 25th overall, combining strong mobility and quality-of-life appeal with weaker procedural and economic dimensions. Academic research and OECD work add another useful warning: digital nomad visas, local impact and mobility patterns are more complicated than simply issuing a permit and waiting for affluent laptop owners to arrive.

And Italy has its own conversation.

The 4th Report on Digital Nomadism in Italy, produced by Associazione Italiana Nomadi Digitali with Ca’ Foscari’s Venice School of Management, is deliberately territorial. It asks how digital nomadism might contribute to rural and internal areas, temporary residency, regeneration and new forms of community. Coliving plays an important role in that model, as does the possibility of attracting younger professionals to places affected by depopulation.

It is a legitimate question. It is simply not the same question NOMAG asked.

NOMAG went in the opposite direction: instead of asking what digital nomads might do for Italy, we asked 1,056 non-Italian respondents what Italy would have to do for them. The distinction turns out to matter.

Our audience has an average age of 41 and an estimated average personal income of around USD 86,000. Only 4.8% are early-career; 69.2% are senior professionals, managers, executives, founders, business owners or post-career. Yet this relatively affluent audience is not demanding champagne-filled coliving palaces with a coworking desk beside the infinity pool.

66.8% want one to three months in Italy. Almost half want one main base. 72.4% prefer a private home or serviced apartment. Medium-sized cities attract 49.4%, against 19.6% for small towns and villages. Transport and accessibility matter to 65.8%, while internet and workspace reach 45.5%.

And then there is probably the most interesting number of all: 24.6% had already considered Italy and decided against it.

That changes the conversation. Italy may not need another campaign explaining that it has beautiful towns, good food and an enviable lifestyle. There is a reasonable chance the people we surveyed have already noticed.

The harder job is converting attraction into somewhere they can actually live for a month, two months or three.

Perhaps, then, there is no definitive answer to “what digital nomads want”. A 29-year-old freelancer recruited through a coliving environment, a 41-year-old executive considering Tuscany with a partner and an American employee using a work-from-anywhere policy can all legitimately be digital nomads.

They just do not necessarily want the same thing.

Which suggests a useful question before launching the next programme designed to attract them:

Which digital nomads do you actually mean?

This is a preview of the international comparison included in the new NOMAG Research report, AT LAST, ITALY… AT LEAST TEMPORARILY. A special preview will be distributed free to NOMAG subscribers.

There are certain things frequent travellers learn to accept.

Airport coffee will cost more than lunch. A seat described as “extra legroom” may give you approximately enough additional space to store one medium-sized knee. Hotel Wi-Fi will be excellent everywhere except inside your room.

And mobile roaming will somehow cost far more than seems reasonable.

For years, we accepted this last one with remarkable docility.

Cross a border. Receive a cheerful text message from your mobile operator. Discover that using Instagram for seventeen minutes may require refinancing your house.

Apparently, however, the party may finally be getting slightly less profitable.

And this time it isn’t NOMAG saying it.

It’s the Financial Times.

According to the FT, around 134 million travel eSIMs are expected to be used globally in 2026, up from 101.8 million last year — an increase of roughly one third. The newspaper also reports that traditional mobile operators derive around 3–5% of their revenues from roaming, typically at relatively attractive margins.

So yes: somewhere, possibly inside a very tasteful telecom headquarters, somebody has noticed that travellers have discovered the “download app” button.

The great roaming revelation

Travel eSIMs are not revolutionary because they have invented mobile data.

They are revolutionary because they have removed several of the irritating steps between I have landed and my phone works.

No shop.

No plastic SIM card.

No hunting for a paperclip.

No attempt to explain your passport number to somebody behind an airport kiosk while twelve people wait behind you.

And, increasingly, no automatic assumption that your existing operator should be allowed to decide what international connectivity costs.

The FT gives a particularly entertaining comparison: a Revolut eSIM example offering 1GB for seven days at £3.49, while EE can charge £8 for 500MB usable over 24 hours.

That does not mean every eSIM is cheaper.

It does mean consumers can now compare prices in approximately the same amount of time it takes to order an Uber.

That changes things.

Digital nomads worked this out rather early

For a traditional tourist, connectivity is convenient.

For a digital nomad, it is infrastructure.

We don’t need data because we desperately want to upload another sunset.

We need it because Slack exists.

Because Zoom exists.

Because our bank decides that the precise moment we cross into Albania is the ideal time to request biometric authentication.

Because the apartment Wi-Fi advertised as “perfect for remote work” occasionally turns out to be a router last rebooted during the Obama administration.

Being able to install another connection in a couple of minutes therefore feels considerably more important when your income depends on remaining online.

And once people become accustomed to switching connectivity providers digitally, something else happens.

Loyalty starts looking slightly old-fashioned.

Your mobile operator may have known you since 2014.

Lovely.

But if another company can connect you in Thailand, Italy or Mexico in three clicks for a fraction of the price, your fourteen-year relationship suddenly begins to feel less like loyalty and more like inertia.

Before Europe gets smug

There is an important caveat.

For EU and EEA consumers travelling within the European roaming area, this story is less dramatic because Roam Like at Home already allows people to use their domestic mobile plan abroad without an additional roaming surcharge, subject to fair-use provisions. The system has been extended until 2032.

And roaming is meant for travel, not permanent expatriation: if you spend and use your phone abroad more than at home over a four-month period, your operator can eventually intervene under fair-use rules.

For someone spending several months in Italy, meanwhile, a proper Italian SIM or eSIM may still make more sense than repeatedly buying travel packages.

So this is not one of those articles entitled:

WE TESTED 37 eSIMs AND NUMBER 14 CHANGED OUR LIVES.

We didn’t.

There is no universally cheapest solution.

There is just much more choice.

And choice is precisely the problem if your old business model relied on customers not having much of it.

The telecom industry is discovering what happened to travel

Hotels discovered Booking.

Taxis discovered Uber.

Banks discovered Revolut and Wise.

Travel agencies discovered that people could apparently operate Google themselves.

Now telecom operators are discovering that the SIM card doesn’t necessarily have to belong to them.

The FT reports that the travel eSIM market was worth an estimated £649 million in 2025 and could reach £3.2 billion by 2030. Meanwhile, the five leading eSIM apps have already recorded more than 26 million downloads this year.

And the competition isn’t only coming from telecom companies.

Banks, fintech platforms and other apps with existing customer bases can simply add connectivity to services people already use.

This is probably the part that should make traditional operators most nervous.

Because the next generation of telecom competitor may not look like a telecom company at all.

Which is very digital-nomad

There is something wonderfully appropriate about this.

Digital nomads have spent years unbundling their lives.

The office became a laptop.

The bank became an app.

The boarding pass became a QR code.

The permanent address became… complicated.

It was perhaps inevitable that the mobile contract would eventually get the same treatment.

Connectivity is becoming something you acquire when and where you need it, rather than something permanently attached to the operator whose shop happened to be closest to your parents’ house when you were eighteen.

For travellers, that’s mostly good news.

For telecom operators, apparently, it is a “challenge”.

For the rest of us, it is called competition.

An important NOMAG commercial disclosure

NOMAG received exactly €0 from Airalo, Saily, Revolut, Klarna, your mobile operator, their mobile operator or anybody else in the eSIM business to write this article.

Our enthusiasm for cheaper roaming is therefore tragically organic.

However, should somebody from the telecom or eSIM industry feel an urgent desire to sponsor NOMAG, we would like to make clear that we are a modern and commercially open-minded publication.

We sell advertising.

We sell partnerships.

Under the right circumstances, we would probably sell NOMAG-branded underwear.

What we don’t sell is the conclusion.

And the conclusion here seems fairly simple:

when travellers are given an easier and cheaper alternative, they tend to use it.

Even the Financial Times has noticed.

There is a particular kind of article I have always loved: the one you begin reading because somebody else is being brilliantly mocked and finish, several minutes later, with the slightly uncomfortable realization that the specimen under observation is, in fact, you.

That happened to me with “Un laptop per salvagente” — roughly, “A Laptop as a Lifebuoy” — by Italian writer and columnist Michele Masneri, published in Il Foglio on August 18. I cannot reproduce the article here, obviously, both out of respect for copyright and because summarising a genuinely funny piece of writing is a little like explaining a joke to somebody who arrived late: you can preserve the facts, but there is a reasonable chance you will murder the thing that made it worth hearing in the first place.

Still, it is worth trying, particularly for an international NOMAG audience, because beneath Masneri’s very Italian — and very funny — social anthropology there is something much bigger going on, something that concerns remote workers, digital nomads and, increasingly, anyone fortunate enough to have some degree of geographical freedom.

So, first, Masneri. Then me. I promise to keep the two separate.

First: what Masneri actually says

Masneri starts from the seemingly endless summer, heatwaves, tropical nights and that increasingly familiar sensation that spending three consecutive months at around 35°C is beginning to alter behaviours we once took for granted. Out of this he identifies — or perhaps, more accurately, defines and gives comic form to — a small new social category: the “migranti climatici di fascia alta,” the “high-end climate migrants,” or MCFA in his acronym. These are obviously not climate migrants in the tragic and literal sense of people displaced because their homes or livelihoods have become unviable; they belong to the enormously more privileged part of humanity whose work can be performed with a computer and a decent internet connection, and who can therefore respond to unbearable weather with a thought that is at once absurdly fortunate and perfectly rational: perhaps I should simply go somewhere else.

Masneri describes this figure as the overheated 2.0 version of the old digital nomad, except that this new nomad may never have wanted to be particularly nomadic in the first place. In the old days, the city in August emptied, evenings eventually cooled down and staying home was still a perfectly viable option. Now the heat continues into the night, tourist cities remain full, and the reluctant MCFA begins looking at maps.

Mountains enter the equation. So do Latvia, Lapland, fjords and Norway, which Masneri jokes has become the new Porto Cervo — the famous Sardinian playground of the wealthy. Family second homes, once valued primarily through nostalgia, are suddenly reassessed according to a much more brutal twenty-first-century criterion: does the place actually have air conditioning?

This is one of the funniest underlying observations in the piece because it also describes a changing hierarchy of domestic luxury. The terrace, once an almost erotic component of the Mediterranean property fantasy, loses some of its charm when it becomes an unusable slab of heat, while fully ducted air conditioning starts behaving suspiciously like a new status symbol. The person who can remain comfortably at home while everybody else is fleeing the city has acquired a privilege that might once have been measured in square metres, views or neighbourhoods.

Then there are friends.

If a friend owns a house by the sea, in the mountains or simply somewhere cooler, the MCFA may find himself becoming unexpectedly receptive to invitations. The problem, Masneri observes, is that escaping summer used to mean perhaps a week or two, whereas now it can mean months. The climate migrant therefore accepts destinations, social situations and even friendships he might previously have avoided; he becomes willing to look after dogs, adjusts to other people’s habits and, in the most extreme evolution of the species, risks becoming the guest who simply never leaves — effectively a climatic squatter installed in somebody else’s holiday home.

And hospitality itself is work. You are no longer entirely free, because you must follow somebody else’s rhythm, converse, entertain and perhaps even speak at breakfast, which Masneri regards with approximately the enthusiasm normally reserved for a minor criminal offence.

Finally, the MCFA begins to investigate secondary areas: lesser-known hills, depopulated valleys, empty houses and villages that suddenly appear rather interesting when the alternatives are a boiling city or a prohibitively expensive summer resort. Inevitably, this leads to that glorious project so many groups of friends have entertained at least once: why don’t we all buy houses in some half-empty village and live there together?

Masneri’s verdict is merciless and probably accurate: it is one of those ideas with an extraordinarily low rate of actual implementation, a kind of personal bridge across the Strait of Messina that everyone carries inside themselves and almost nobody ever builds.

That, more or less, is Masneri.

If you read Italian, go and find the original, because the argument survives summarising but most of the pleasure does not.

And now my problem: I appear to be one of them

The reason the piece stayed with me, however, is that I could not maintain the comfortable distance of the observer for very long.

At NOMAG we spend an almost unreasonable amount of time discussing remote work, digital nomadism, mobility, temporary living, secondary destinations and what happens to places when work no longer forces everyone into the same geographical patterns. I have been professionally obsessed with variations of this question for years, through different magazines and projects, because beneath all the fashionable vocabulary there is one fairly radical change that still has not been fully absorbed.

What happens to the geography of your life when work stops deciding, every single morning, exactly where you have to be?

For most of modern working history the answer was simple because there was barely a question. The office was there, the factory was there, the studio or shop was there, therefore you lived somewhere from which getting there every morning was possible, and then — ideally — attempted to enjoy the rest of the arrangement.

Once that link loosens, even partially, things become considerably more complicated.

Because you no longer ask only where you would like to live.

You begin asking when.

And I increasingly suspect that “when” is going to matter almost as much as “where” for a certain kind of mobile worker.

I apparently spent years migrating without giving it the correct name

For years I have alternated London with small Italian towns where work took me, while inserting into that geography long periods working either at high altitude in the Dolomites or at high latitude in Norway.

I never described this as climate migration because I had much more respectable explanations available. Remote work. Professional mobility. Being close to projects. Curiosity. A preference for changing environments. A perhaps constitutionally questionable inability to remain in the same place for too long.

All of those explanations were true.

But looking at the map retrospectively, there is something rather suspicious about repeatedly deciding, whenever geographical freedom allowed it, to place myself either considerably higher above sea level or considerably further north.

Perhaps climate had something to do with it after all.

And not only climate.

People.

Because over the years I have discovered something else about myself which may require the creation of a subcategory Masneri did not include: the moderately antisocial climate migrant, someone who is often attracted to exactly the same beautiful places everybody else loves, but finds them considerably more beautiful once everybody else has left.

The destination may be right. The season may be wrong.

The Dolomites are extraordinary. This is not breaking news.

But I find them even more extraordinary when a mountain road is functioning as a mountain road rather than an unusually scenic car park, when eating somewhere does not require the logistical skills of a military planner, and when it is possible to look at a mountain without a queue of people between you and the mountain, each waiting patiently to manufacture more or less the same photograph.

Norway is similar. It remains one of the places where I have found it easiest to work for long stretches, but I feel no particular need to demonstrate my affection for it by arriving precisely when everyone else does and paying the maximum achievable price for every available bed, meal and square metre of temporary shelter.

And many of Italy’s smaller towns work in exactly the same way.

I know quite a few of them not because an algorithm identified them for me as the “10 Secret Italian Villages You Must Visit Before Everyone Else Does” — which is usually the fastest possible route to ensuring that everyone else does — but because work brought me there. In July and August they can become stages. A few weeks later they become towns again.

Perhaps quieter, occasionally inconvenient, sometimes even slightly melancholy, but infinitely more interesting if your objective is not to consume the place in forty-eight hours but to live there for a while.

This is where climate migration starts overlapping with a question that I think is much more important than the usual digital-nomad fantasy of endless movement: seasonality.

Remote work does not only allow us to choose different destinations. It may allow some of us to redistribute ourselves across those destinations at different times.

And that is a far more interesting proposition.

We have spent too long confusing freedom with movement

There has always been something faintly competitive in the language surrounding digital nomadism: countries visited, airports crossed, cities worked from, passports filled, laptops photographed in places where no sensible person would willingly place an expensive electronic device.

Movement itself became evidence of freedom.

After years of moving around, I have arrived at a conclusion that is almost embarrassingly unfashionable:

perhaps I should migrate less.

Not stop moving. Move better.

Stay longer in the places that genuinely work for me, rather than treating geography as a collection exercise. Because if remote work gives us anything genuinely valuable, surely it should not merely be the ability to change airport every three weeks; it should also give us the ability to choose more intelligently where we spend meaningful pieces of our lives.

Perhaps the real luxury is not being able to say that you have worked from twenty-seven countries.

Perhaps it is staying somewhere long enough to know where to buy bread without opening Google Maps.

Long enough for the person behind the bar to stop asking where you are from.

Long enough to become, temporarily at least, something slightly more interesting than a visitor.

There remains one problem with Masneri’s diagnosis

I am prepared to accept the first part.

Climate migrant: guilty.

I may even plead guilty to the moderately antisocial subcategory, particularly because one of the great advantages of travelling out of season is that there are fewer human beings occupying precisely the same square metre you were hoping to enjoy.

It is the “high-end” part that creates difficulties.

Because being a genuinely high-end climate migrant would presumably mean being able to choose the Dolomites precisely when everyone wants the Dolomites: peak summer or the height of ski season.

I cannot.

And, increasingly, I am not even sure I would want to.

So over the years I appear to have developed a considerably less glamorous strategy, one which lacks the obvious Instagram value of perpetual peak-season mobility but compensates with lower prices, fewer queues and a surprising amount of peace.

Follow the climate, but travel against the season.

Perhaps move less often. Stay considerably longer. Choose destinations according to the moment in which they actually work for you rather than the moment in which everyone has been told to want them.

That may not qualify as high-end migration.

But you sleep better.

It costs a lot less.

And, occasionally, you even get the mountain to yourself.

So, kudos to Michele Masneri for an article that began by making me laugh at an amusing new social category and ended by making me realise I have apparently been living inside it for years.

The diagnosis, unfortunately, appears to be correct.

“Influencers are transforming travel,” announces the Financial Times.

It certainly sounds more exciting than “travel companies are spending more money on social media”, which is what most of the evidence actually demonstrates.

Take Expedia’s partnership with IShowSpeed. After a Caribbean livestream, Expedia reported search demand rising by 70 per cent for Sint Maarten, 50 per cent for Guadeloupe and 35 per cent for Dominica. Impressive numbers. But searches are not bookings, bookings are not completed trips, and completed trips are not necessarily profitable customers.

In fact, the next stage of Expedia’s campaign introduced a shoppable video and links to booking pages specifically to turn all that awareness into actual transactions. In other words, the first campaign proved that millions of people had looked. The company was still working on getting them to buy.

Virgin Voyages offers another suitably enormous example. It invited more than 1,000 TikTok creators onto a complimentary cruise. The company called it one of the largest creator activations in its history. According to results reported by Skift, it produced more than 17,000 pieces of content, 108mn views and 3.8mn engagements in a matter of days. Traffic arriving from social platforms more than doubled.

Bookings? They may have been “accelerated”. No number was disclosed.

So what was transformed? Marketing, unquestionably. Travel behaviour, possibly. Commercial performance, classified information.

To its credit, the FT acknowledges that measuring real-world impact remains difficult. That caveat matters more than the headline. Views, likes, searches, website visits and bookings describe different moments in a funnel. Reporting them as interchangeable versions of “influence” is how a marketing campaign becomes a cultural revolution before anyone has packed a suitcase.

This distinction matters even more in the digital nomad world. Influencers and digital nomads may both travel with phones and laptops. That is approximately where the similarity ends.

An influencer can make a destination visible overnight. A digital nomad must discover whether it remains liveable on Tuesday morning: housing, connectivity, transport, healthcare, visas, taxation, community and the price of staying beyond the photogenic weekend.

A viral campaign can produce a spike. Location-independent living creates slower, less glamorous questions about seasonality, infrastructure and whether a place works as a temporary home rather than a backdrop.

Creators are becoming important media channels. Affiliate links, bookable videos and creator storefronts may eventually make their value easier to measure. But until companies disclose additional bookings, repeat customers, length of stay and attributable revenue, we should call the phenomenon what the available evidence supports.

Influencers are transforming travel marketing.

The travel revolution itself may be real. For now, its best-documented destination is the marketing department.

There was a time when going somewhere beautiful was an excellent excuse for not answering emails. Technology has solved that problem.

Today, the fantasy is familiar: laptop open somewhere between an infinity pool and the Mediterranean, one final video call before a swim, perhaps a coffee in a picturesque square after finishing the presentation. Work has escaped the office and apparently acquired much better taste in real estate.

Except that the numbers suggest something more interesting is happening. This is no longer a niche fantasy involving a handful of freelancers with suspiciously photogenic laptops. In the EU, around 23% of employed people could work from home at least sometimes in 2024, compared with 14.7% in 2019. The European Commission describes this as a structural change in the labour market — while also warning about the increasingly blurred boundary between professional and private life.

In other words, we have made enormous progress in solving the problem of where we can work. We may have been slightly less successful in solving the problem of when we should stop.

Paradise is becoming an employee benefit

Temporary working from abroad — often marketed under the now unavoidable label of “workation” — is rapidly moving from perk to expectation.

A 2024 PwC survey of 1,000 German employees whose jobs could theoretically be performed remotely found that 57% considered the possibility of working temporarily from abroad important when choosing an employer. More remarkably, 30% said they would reject a job offer if the company did not provide it. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, that rose to 45%. Meanwhile, 51% said their employer already permitted mobile working from abroad, for an average of 40.5 days per year, up from 30.3 days in the previous survey.

So yes, the demand is real.

But so is the comedy.

Among employees whose companies already offered the option, only about half actually understood the application process. Apparently we have reached a stage of civilisation in which employees may reject an employer for not allowing them to work from Mallorca, while remaining slightly unclear about how to ask permission to work from Mallorca.

Fraunhofer IAO reached a similarly complicated conclusion. Its study of 964 people, conducted between July 2023 and December 2024, found that 68% were familiar with the concept, but only 34% said their employer allowed it, and just one quarter had actually experienced it themselves. Among those who had, the results were positive: 65% reported higher motivation and 71% greater job satisfaction.

So paradise may indeed help.

It just needs IT support.

An extraordinary 97% of Fraunhofer respondents considered stable digital infrastructure essential, while 75% regarded access to nature as important for wellbeing. Almost half — 48% — identified approval procedures as a significant challenge, and 34% worried about unclear costs.

The perfect remote destination, therefore, requires sunshine, natural beauty, reliable fibre broadband, an ergonomic chair, HR approval and preferably somebody who understands international tax law.

Not quite the Instagram carousel.

A beach does not turn a job into a holiday

There is another conceptual problem with the whole idea: moving work somewhere enjoyable does not automatically make the work enjoyable.

If your calendar contains six meetings on Tuesday in Frankfurt, moving yourself to Tenerife may result principally in six meetings on Tuesday in Tenerife. The Atlantic will be magnificent. You will mostly see it between calls.

And evidence on hybrid work suggests that flexibility genuinely can improve work-life balance and productivity, but the benefits come with familiar costs: longer hours, weaker boundaries, fewer structured breaks and ergonomic problems when people work from unsuitable locations. Eurofound’s 2025 analysis makes the point rather less romantically than the travel industry does: flexibility works best when workers have autonomy and organisations have clear rules.

This matters because the most successful version of location-independent work is probably not the most spontaneous one.

It is the organised one.

People who do this well tend to know when they are working, where they will work, how good the internet is, whether they can take confidential calls, what time zone their colleagues occupy and what happens when the Wi-Fi disappears precisely three minutes before a client presentation.

Freedom, it turns out, requires an impressive amount of planning.

And these people are not necessarily backpackers

There is also a persistent problem with the image of the person doing all this.

The cultural stereotype remains young, lightly employed and permanently accompanied by a backpack. The data increasingly tell a different story.

MBO Partners estimates that 18.5 million Americans described themselves as digital nomads in 2025, around 12% of the US workforce and 153% more than in 2019. Even more interestingly, 11.2 million had traditional jobs, rather than working exclusively as freelancers or independent professionals.

Our own NOMAG research produces an even sharper warning against designing the entire remote-work economy around twenty-somethings hunting for cheap coworking desks. Among 1,056 international respondents interested in digital nomadism and Italy, only 4.8% were at the beginning of their careers; 69.2% were senior professionals, managers, entrepreneurs, executives or post-career, while 56.6% reported gross personal annual income of at least €60,000.

That changes the question considerably.

A senior manager spending six weeks working from Italy is not necessarily looking for a hammock, a communal kitchen and Friday-night networking drinks with twelve startup founders. They may simply want an excellent house, good connectivity, privacy and the ability to continue doing a serious job somewhere they would actually like to live.

Less “escape from civilisation”.

More civilisation with better weather.

Then the tax authorities enter paradise

And eventually, inevitably, somebody from compliance appears beside the swimming pool.

The seductive slogan “work from anywhere” was invented by marketing departments. Governments, tax authorities and social-security systems were built around the rather older assumption that people normally worked somewhere.

The conflict has become significant enough that the OECD updated its Model Tax Convention commentary in November 2025 specifically to address cross-border remote working and when an employee working abroad can contribute to creating a taxable presence for their employer. In broad terms, the new guidance says that working from a home in another country for less than half of total working time would not, by itself, normally create such a business presence; even above that level, factors such as whether the employer has a commercial reason for the work being carried out there matter.

That should not be confused with a universal “safe” number of days for the individual. There is no magical 183-day beach pass making tax, immigration, labour law and social security disappear. Different rules answer different questions, and bilateral treaties, residence, nationality, employment status and destination all matter.

Which explains another revealing 2025 MBO finding: 13% of digital nomads with traditional employment said their employer did not know they were nomadic, while another 18% said their company had no formal policy but their boss had informally approved the arrangement.

Nothing says “future of work” quite like international mobility governed by “my manager said it was probably fine”.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question

The interesting debate, then, is no longer whether working from beautiful places is possible. Clearly it is.

Nor is it whether some people thrive doing it. Clearly they do.

The deeper question is what happens when technology eliminates the physical boundary that once separated work from the rest of life.

For some people, geographical flexibility means enormous freedom: spending longer periods abroad, being closer to family, learning another language, testing a future relocation or simply escaping February in Northern Europe. Those are substantial benefits, not lifestyle trivia.

But there is an opposite possibility.

If every destination becomes compatible with work, every destination can also become a workplace.

The beach no longer means holiday. It means excellent background for Zoom. The mountain house gains a second identity as a satellite office. A month in Spain becomes an opportunity to improve your Spanish — between meetings.

Perhaps this is why the distinction between travelling while working and actually taking a holiday deserves to survive.

We spent decades creating paid annual leave so people could occasionally stop working. Then we invented technology sufficiently advanced to allow them to keep working from the pool.

That is certainly innovation.

Whether it is progress is a more interesting question.

The real luxury of location independence may ultimately have very little to do with being able to open a laptop anywhere.

It may be having enough control over your life to decide when not to open it at all.

For years, Italy has looked at digital nomads through the same images: young freelancers, backpacks, cheap destinations, coworking spaces, coliving and remote villages.

But our new NOMAG research into digital nomads, international remote professionals and their relationship with Italy suggests that, at least among the 1,056 international respondents in our community, many of those assumptions simply do not hold.

Only 4.8% are at the beginning of their careers. By contrast, 69.2% are senior professionals, managers, entrepreneurs, executives or post-career. More than half — 56.6% — report gross personal annual income of at least €60,000.

Assumption one: the digital nomads considering Italy are young.
Not really.

Assumption two: they want to keep moving.
Again, not really. 48% prefer one main base from which to travel occasionally, while only 9.9% want to move frequently. And 66.8% would ideally stay in Italy for one to three months.

Assumption three: Italy should attract them through remote villages.
The most popular choice is actually a medium-sized city, considered by 49.4% of respondents. Small towns and villages attract 19.6%; rural or mountain areas 10.2%.

Assumption four: they want coliving.
Only 9.3% do. A much larger 72.4% prefer an entire private home or serviced apartment.

Assumption five: fast Wi-Fi is the key to choosing Italy.
It matters, but transport and accessibility matter more: 65.8% cite them as influential, followed by healthcare and everyday services at 59.8%. Reliable internet and workspace come later, at 45.5%.

Assumption six: Italian taxes and bureaucracy are the main obstacle.
They are part of the picture, but they are not at the top. The biggest deterrent is transport, healthcare and daily services, cited by 57.8%, followed by language and local integration at 48.3%.

And perhaps the biggest assumption of all is hidden in the word “nomad”.

The people considering Italy in our survey often look less like permanent travellers and more like temporary international residents: established professionals looking for a functional base, privacy, services, transport, healthcare and a place that works beyond the tourist season.

That matters for Italy.

Because Italy may not need to invent a new lifestyle for digital nomads. It may need to stop designing policies around a stereotype.

The real question is not: how can Italy attract digital nomads?

It is: what stops people who already want Italy from actually choosing it?

Sometimes the answer is much less glamorous than a coworking space overlooking olive trees.

It is ordinary life.

And that may be the most important finding of this first preview: Italy’s opportunity is real, but the product we keep imagining for this audience may be the wrong one.

The full research will be published by the end of the month and will be available to all subscribers free of charge.

Europe is melting, holiday towns are full, and that charming apartment you booked for a month has no air conditioning. Suddenly “work from anywhere” looks less like freedom and more like a badly managed infrastructure project.

For years, digital nomadism has been sold through a remarkably stable collection of images: a laptop overlooking the sea, a coffee placed somewhere photogenic but dangerously close to the keyboard, perhaps a linen shirt, certainly no visible cables, and absolutely nobody sweating. The underlying promise was even simpler: if your work has become independent from an office, geography becomes a personal choice. You can work from Lisbon instead of London, Tuscany instead of Milan, a Greek island instead of Berlin. Technically, this remains true. What the photographs omitted was that geography also comes with weather, buildings, neighbours, tourists, mosquitoes, seasonal traffic, electricity grids, bedroom temperatures and, occasionally, a village festival involving amplified music until two in the morning. Freedom from the office did not abolish physical reality. It merely transferred responsibility for managing it from your employer to you.

Europe in the summer of 2026 is providing a particularly effective demonstration. On August 11, Reuters estimated that around 204 million people — 56% of Western Europe’s population — would experience temperatures at least 5°C above the historical norm for the time of year. The World Meteorological Organization said parts of Europe were enduring their fifth heatwave of a summer already marked by drought, wildfires and record-breaking temperatures, with unusually warm seas and dry soils helping to amplify the heat. Europe is warming faster than any other continent. This is no longer the amusing southern-European ritual in which a British newspaper discovers every July that Spain can be hot. It changes the practical mathematics of living and working remotely.

The problem becomes particularly obvious when the digital nomad decides to spend August in a holiday destination. A holiday home and a remote-working home may occupy the same square metres, but they are not necessarily the same product. A small bedroom that is perfectly acceptable when you return from dinner at midnight becomes less charming when you have been trying to sleep there since 11 p.m. at 31 degrees. The beautiful terrace is wonderful for breakfast and unusable for a Zoom call at two in the afternoon. The romantic attic with exposed beams turns out to be an oven with heritage features. The Wi-Fi that was perfectly adequate for checking restaurant reviews collapses when two people simultaneously attempt video calls. And the absence of air conditioning, described in the listing through strategic silence or the reassuring presence of a decorative fan, stops being a rustic detail once you have to write, think, negotiate or make decisions for eight hours.

This is not simply a question of being spoiled. Europe’s housing stock was not uniformly designed for the summers Europe is now experiencing. The European Commission notes that room air conditioning remains less common than in countries such as the United States, Japan or South Korea, even though installations are rising rapidly. Eurostat reported in July that household energy consumption for cooling in the EU doubled between 2018 and 2024. Another EU analysis found that roughly 26% of European households were unable to keep their homes comfortably cool in summer, rising to almost 35% among the lowest-income group. In other words, “does it have air conditioning?” is becoming less of an American tourist’s irritating obsession and more of a legitimate infrastructure question.

Then there is the slightly awkward matter of productivity. Digital nomad mythology tends to assume that if you possess a laptop and internet connection, work will follow. The human brain has apparently not signed this agreement. The World Health Organization says labour productivity falls as heat stress rises and cites evidence that productivity can decline by 2–3% for every degree increase beyond a 20°C Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature threshold, a measure that incorporates temperature, humidity, airflow and radiant heat. Indoor workers are not magically exempt simply because they are sitting beside a tasteful ceramic lamp rather than laying asphalt. Heat affects fatigue, concentration and the body’s ability to regulate itself; bad sleep then arrives as a complimentary second shift. You can still answer emails at 34 degrees. You can also answer emails after drinking three glasses of wine. Neither proves that the operating environment is optimal.

The timing is almost comically bad because August also happens to be the moment when many digital nomads are tempted to choose destinations precisely because they imagine them at their best. Unfortunately, several million conventional tourists have had exactly the same idea. Eurostat says 31.1% of all nights spent in EU tourist accommodation in 2025 occurred in July and August, the two busiest months in every EU country; August alone recorded 3.6 times as many overnight stays as January. In Croatia, more than half of the entire year’s tourism nights were concentrated in those two months. So the person arriving in a famous coastal village in August looking for tranquillity, authenticity and time to concentrate has performed an interesting piece of market analysis: they have deliberately chosen the moment of maximum demand and are then surprised to discover other humans.

This is where the difference between travelling and nomading becomes important. A tourist can tolerate inefficiency because inefficiency is temporary. The restaurant is full? Have dinner later. The room is hot? Go to the beach. The square is noisy? Order another drink. A person trying to work has a much narrower tolerance because the destination is simultaneously home, office and recovery space. Suddenly the charming village church bell is not cultural heritage but an hourly notification system you cannot disable. The family renting the apartment upstairs does not know that your board call starts at nine. The beach club does not care that you have a deadline. The supermarket queue, parking problem and forty-minute search for a table that form part of the holiday experience become unpaid administrative tasks inserted into the working day. By the middle of August you may discover that you have successfully escaped the office only to construct a considerably less efficient one yourself.

There is also a deeper mistake in the traditional digital-nomad map. We tend to evaluate destinations as places: Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Greece, the south of France. Increasingly they need to be evaluated as combinations of place, month and property. Florence in May is not Florence in August. A stone house on a shaded hill is not an attic apartment under a tiled roof. A quiet village in October may become a car park with medieval architecture in the middle of the summer season. A house with shutters, cross-ventilation, external shade and proper cooling may offer a completely different working experience from the beautiful property fifty metres away that photographs better. The relevant unit of digital-nomad geography is therefore no longer “destination”. It is destination × season × building × infrastructure. Not quite as catchy on Instagram, admittedly, but substantially more useful.

The smartest nomads will probably adapt in exactly the way other mobile populations always have: by following conditions rather than postcards. Northern Europe, mountain regions, Atlantic climates and cities with properly designed housing may become relatively more attractive during the hottest weeks, while Mediterranean destinations regain their enormous appeal in spring, early summer and autumn. This does not mean abandoning southern Europe; it means abandoning the peculiar idea that the same place must be equally suitable twelve months a year simply because the internet works there. Climate change is likely to make seasonality more important, not less. The freedom to move becomes genuinely valuable only when you are prepared to use it.

And there is one final irony. Plenty of people became digital nomads because they wanted to escape the rigid calendar of conventional working life. Then they continued travelling according to exactly the same calendar as everybody else: seaside in August, cities in spring, somewhere warm for Christmas, paying peak prices to experience peak congestion while carrying an occupation with them. Perhaps the genuinely radical move is not working from a beach. Perhaps it is going to the beach in October, when the apartment costs less, the neighbours have gone home, the sea is still there and nobody is trying to conduct an aqua-aerobics class underneath your window.

The moral: digital nomadism was never really about being able to work from anywhere. It is about being able to choose where and when work works. In a hotter, more crowded and more climatically unpredictable Europe, the winning skill is no longer simply mobility; it is timing. Before booking the next picturesque escape, forget the infinity pool for thirty seconds and ask the questions your Instagram feed will never ask: How hot is the bedroom at midnight? Is there real cooling? Where will I actually work? What happens here in August? And can I leave if the answer turns out to be “hell with good Wi-Fi”? Because freedom is not the ability to live anywhere. It is the ability to recognise when somewhere has stopped working — and move.

There is a peculiar corner of modern journalism where almost anything can become scientifically “the best in the world” provided somebody has built a sufficiently elaborate spreadsheet around it. The best city to live in, the happiest country, the most liveable capital, the ideal destination for digital nomads, the perfect place to retire, the best country for entrepreneurs and, now, the best place on Earth to relocate to in 2026. This time the winner is Estonia, courtesy of the Rumavi Global Relocation Index, which ranks 192 countries across 24 metrics covering finance and taxation, liveability and health, safety and stability, and what it calls settling and opportunity.

Before anyone in Tallinn gets annoyed, this is not an attack on Estonia. Estonia may very well be an excellent place to live. It has spent years building a reputation for efficient digital government, a serious technology ecosystem and a comparatively straightforward environment for doing business. The top ten produced by the index is not exactly a collection of hellholes either: Singapore, Malaysia, Portugal, Taiwan, Lithuania, Hong Kong, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Czechia and Malta all appear alongside it. The problem is not that these are bad places. The problem is the extraordinary leap from “these countries perform well according to the variables we selected” to “this is the best place in the world for you to move to”.

That leap is where rankings become so entertaining.

Estonia, for example, scores 99 out of 100 for currency and banking, 96 for business opportunities, 82 for housing affordability, 86 for green spaces and 77 for street safety. Its score for climate comfort is 20. Not 70, not 50: twenty. Yet it still comes first. There is nothing mathematically wrong with that. It simply means that whoever designed the index decided that climate should carry less weight than other factors. Which is perfectly legitimate, but also exposes the little secret behind almost every supposedly objective lifestyle ranking: underneath all the data there is somebody deciding what matters, how much it matters and to whom it should matter.

How much should climate count when choosing where to spend the next ten years of your life? How much is being able to open a bank account efficiently worth compared with being close to your family? Is lower taxation more important than healthcare? Is cheap housing still cheap if local salaries are lower? How much should language, culture, food, social life, connectivity, loneliness or simply liking the place count? None of these questions has a universal answer. Yet once each factor is given a numerical value and a weighting, the resulting score suddenly acquires the appearance of science. It is one of the great tricks of the ranking industry: subjective assumptions go in at one end and objective-looking decimals come out at the other.

To Rumavi’s credit, the index appears to draw on serious sources, including World Bank data, cost-of-living research, peace and stability indicators and expert assessments. That makes the underlying information potentially useful. But respectable source material does not magically turn a composite index into a law of nature. You are still combining different datasets, produced for different purposes and often measuring very different things, then normalising them, weighting them and reducing the whole messiness of human life to a single score. It is essentially an opinion with a spreadsheet attached to it.

The index itself indirectly acknowledges this by producing separate rankings for families, entrepreneurs, retirees and digital nomads. Of course it does, because the idea that these groups are looking for the same thing is obviously absurd. A digital nomad may care enormously about connectivity, taxation of foreign income and cost of living while barely thinking about schools or permanent residency. A retired couple may care much more about healthcare, security and taxation. A family with young children may rank schools and street safety above almost everything else. An entrepreneur may tolerate higher costs in exchange for better access to capital and talent. The moment you change the person, you change the priorities; the moment you change the priorities, you change the winner. At that point the concept of a universal “best place to relocate to” begins to look rather silly.

But “the best country for a hypothetical person whose preferences broadly match the weightings chosen by the authors of this index” is not much of a headline, and this is where the PR machinery earns its keep.

An organisation publishes a ranking. The ranking needs coverage. A country comes first. A press release becomes a story saying that the country “has been named the world’s best place to relocate to”. Another publication rewrites the story, another quotes it, LinkedIn begins to fill up with people explaining what Estonia can teach us about the future of work, somebody turns the top ten into a carousel and eventually a relocation consultant, property company or destination marketer discovers that this is all extremely convenient content. Give it a few days and somebody who has never spent a January in Tallinn will be explaining, with great authority, why you should move there.

This does not require a conspiracy. That would almost give the whole thing too much credit. Rankings thrive because they are a beautifully efficient piece of media machinery. They provide a winner, a loser, a number, a headline and a reason for ten countries to promote the same piece of research. They are perfect for PR, irresistible to search-driven publishing and wonderfully cheap editorially because nobody needs to travel anywhere, interview anyone who actually moved or spend much time asking whether a 24-variable index can capture something as complicated as uprooting a life and starting again elsewhere. The ranking has already done the thinking for you.

And, to be clear, rankings are not useless. A well-constructed index can be a perfectly sensible research tool. If you are considering moving abroad and Estonia, Portugal, Lithuania or Malaysia consistently perform well across areas that matter to you, they deserve investigation. Rankings can surface places you had overlooked, highlight issues worth researching and help build a shortlist. The stupidity begins only when a shortlist becomes a verdict.

Because there is still one research method that works rather better when deciding where to live: go there.

Not for a weekend organised by a tourism board, preferably. Stay long enough to look for an apartment, use public transport, shop for groceries, work for a few days, deal with a local service, understand what healthcare actually means in practice and discover what the place feels like after the novelty has gone. If it is Estonia, perhaps try February rather than June. See whether 20 out of 100 for climate comfort still feels like a minor footnote when the light disappears in the afternoon. Talk to people who moved there and stayed, and perhaps more importantly to people who moved there and left. Find out whether the wonderfully efficient banking system compensates for whatever you personally dislike about the place.

Then decide.

Estonia may genuinely be one of Europe’s most interesting places to build a life, a company or both. Portugal may be better for somebody else. Malaysia may beat both for a remote worker. Malta may be exactly right for another person and completely unbearable for the next. Real life has an irritating habit of refusing to fit neatly into rankings.

So no, Estonia has not been discovered to be “the best place in the world to relocate to”. Estonia came first in one index built using 24 selected metrics, a particular methodology and a particular set of weightings. That is still interesting. It is simply not the same claim.

Unfortunately, accuracy rarely travels as far as a superlative. And so the annual circus continues: PR people, advertisers, editors hungry for a cheap ranking story and assorted ranking wankers who rarely leave the house telling the rest of us where, apparently, we should spend our lives.

As promised, here is a first taste of NOMAG’s research project, Italy, At Least… Temporarily: an anonymous English-language questionnaire sent to 1,500 long-standing international members of the NOMAG audience, with 1,056 complete and partial responses.

The early finding? Italy does not need to sell more mythology. People already want Italy. The problem is making Italy easy enough to choose.

When asked what influences where they would stay, respondents put transport and accessibility first, at 65.8%. Healthcare and practical services follow at 59.8%. Internet and workspace — the sacred altar of most digital-nomad PowerPoints — comes third, at 45.5%.

So yes, Wi-Fi matters. But apparently buses, trains, doctors, pharmacies and the ability to live normally matter too. Shocking news for anyone still designing “nomad strategies” around beanbags, exposed brick and a laptop under a lemon tree.

This matters because NOMAG’s audience is not the usual cartoon of young backpackers drifting from one beach to another. The research points to experienced professionals, entrepreneurs, employees, couples and families looking for a private home, a stable base and services that work beyond the tourist season.

The message for Italy is simple: do not invent a lifestyle for digital nomads. Make temporary life work.

Why, how and when international professionals choose, consider or rule out living and working in Italy - in one place or several, in cities, smaller towns or rural areas.

This is not an academic study of digital nomadism in Italy.

For official statistics, classifications and scientific analysis of the phenomenon, we are happy to refer readers to reports produced by specialist associations and universities.

The NOMAG research starts from a different perspective.

Not digital nomadism in Italy, but non-Italian digital nomads and Italy.

What do internationally mobile professionals really think about the country? Have they already lived and worked here? Are they considering it? And, when they decide against Italy, what makes them look elsewhere?

Almost 1,000 people, from an audience of nearly 80,000

Across its newsletters, platforms and databases, NOMAG currently reaches an audience of almost 80,000 people.

Approximately 41% are Italian, and they were deliberately excluded from this survey. We wanted to hear exclusively from non-Italians: people looking at Italy from the outside, whether they had already experienced the country, were actively considering it or had decided not to choose it.

We contacted and collected responses from approximately 1,000 NOMAG readers, selected to reflect, as closely as possible, the profile and variety of our international audience.

This does not make the survey statistically representative of every digital nomad worldwide. Nor is it intended to compete with academic research.

But almost 1,000 responses provide considerably more than a collection of anecdotes.

Almost serious research, one might say.

And, most importantly, the respondents belong to precisely the audience that an increasing number of Italian municipalities, regions and local regeneration projects say they want to attract.

Not just young people with backpacks

The term digital nomad is still frequently associated in Italy with young travellers carrying a backpack and a laptop, moving from one inexpensive destination to another.

That group exists. But it represents only part of a much broader population.

Digital nomads also include experienced professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, consultants, freelance workers, remote employees and people who are retired or semi-retired but remain professionally active.

Some travel constantly. Others spend several months each year in one or two locations. Some move alone, while others travel with partners, children or other family members.

They have different incomes, professional backgrounds, expectations, responsibilities and spending power.

They may want to live in Milan, Rome or Florence. Or they may prefer a smaller town, a village, a rural area or a coastal location. They may choose one permanent base, divide their time between several places or return to the same part of Italy every year.

Treating all of them as tourists with computers is not merely reductive. It can lead to the wrong policies, services and promotional strategies.

The people Italian municipalities think they know

Digital nomads increasingly appear in plans for repopulation, economic regeneration and territorial development.

They are described as potential temporary residents, consumers, professionals and contributors to local economies.

Yet many initiatives still appear to imagine them as slightly more sophisticated tourists: people who can be attracted by a beautiful landscape, a desk, reliable internet and a few months of sunshine.

The responses we received suggest that, in many cases, this interpretation is simply wrong.

Internet access matters, of course. So do climate, culture and quality of life.

But choosing to spend a meaningful period in another country depends on much more: housing, bureaucracy, taxation, transport, healthcare, accessibility, language, everyday services, family needs, social integration and the possibility of developing a routine rather than simply consuming a destination.

People distinguish between a place that looks appealing in a promotional campaign and one in which daily life actually works.

They may love Italy and still decide not to come.

They may visit regularly without ever considering the country as a realistic place from which to work.

They may be willing to spend more than many local authorities assume, while expecting services that local plans have barely considered.

And they may be far less interested in coworking tables and organised aperitivi than promoters imagine.

Experience matters

We did not only ask respondents whether they liked Italy.

We asked how often they travel, how many had already lived as digital nomads, how long they had worked in this way and which parts of the world they had already experienced.

We asked about their professional status, seniority and approximate income.

We also asked where they currently live, because someone evaluating Italy from another EU country faces a very different set of practical questions from someone living in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Asia or Australia.

This matters because the phrase digital nomad often hides radically different profiles.

A senior executive spending part of the year abroad is not making the same decisions as an early-career freelance worker. A family with children has different requirements from a person travelling alone. An experienced international professional who has already lived in six countries is likely to evaluate a destination differently from someone considering their first period abroad.

Why, where, when and under what conditions

We asked whether respondents had already lived and worked remotely from Italy, were actively considering it, had considered it but decided against it or had never regarded it as a realistic option.

We asked how long they would ideally stay and whether they would prefer one main base or several locations.

We asked what kind of place they would choose: a major city, a medium-sized city, a small town, a rural area or a coastal location.

We asked what attracts them to Italy and what discourages them.

We asked about accommodation, budgets, essential services and what might convince them to remain longer, return regularly or choose Italy over another country.

The answers contain several surprises.

Some challenge the way digital nomads are commonly portrayed in Italy. Others raise broader questions about how the country presents itself to internationally mobile professionals and whether the services being developed correspond to what those people genuinely need.

And the surprises do not end there.

The first findings are coming

NOMAG is now processing and analysing the responses.

Over the coming days, we will publish a series of previews from:

ITALY, AT LEAST… TEMPORARILY

Why, how and when international professionals choose, consider or rule out living and working in Italy.

The complete report will be published free of charge.

To receive it, readers can subscribe to the NOMAG newsletters on Substack or LinkedIn.

Subscribe now

THE 20 QUESTIONS WE ASKED

The survey was addressed exclusively to non-Italian respondents. Some questions allowed multiple answers; this was always stated explicitly.

1. Where do you currently live?

• European Union

• United Kingdom

• Other European country outside the EU and UK

• United States

• Canada

• Latin America or the Caribbean

• Africa

• Middle East

• Asia

• Australia, New Zealand or the Pacific

Select one.

2. Have you ever lived and worked as a digital nomad or location-independent professional?

• Yes, I currently do

• Yes, regularly in the past

• Yes, once or occasionally

• No, but I am considering it

• No, and I am not considering it

Select one.

3. For how long have you worked in this way altogether?

• Less than three months

• Three to twelve months

• One to three years

• More than three years

• I have not done it yet

Select one.

4. How many work-related or leisure trips do you normally take in a year?

• One or two

• Three to five

• Six to ten

• More than ten

• It varies considerably

Select one.

5. In which parts of the world have you already lived or worked remotely?

• Europe

• North America

• Latin America or the Caribbean

• Asia or Oceania

• Africa or the Middle East

Select all that apply.

6. Which description best reflects your current professional situation?

• Employee or executive working remotely

• Freelancer, consultant or independent professional

• Entrepreneur or business owner

• Retired or semi-retired professional

• Other or between professional stages

Select one.

7. How would you describe your level of professional experience?

• Early career

• Mid-career

• Senior professional or manager

• Executive, founder or business owner

• Retired or semi-retired

Select one.

8. What is your approximate annual personal income before tax?

• Under €30,000

• €30,000–€59,999

• €60,000–€99,999

• €100,000–€199,999

• €200,000 or more

Select one.

9. With whom would you be most likely to live in Italy?

• Alone

• With a partner

• With a partner and children

• With other family members

• With friends or colleagues

Select one.

10. Have you ever lived and worked remotely from Italy?

• Yes, more than once

• Yes, once

• No, but I am actively considering it

• I considered it but decided against it

• No, I have never seriously considered it

Select one.

11. How long would you ideally spend in Italy?

• Less than one month

• One to three months

• Three to six months

• Six to twelve months

• Part of every year or longer

Select one.

12. How would you prefer to organise your time in Italy?

• Stay in one main location

• Use one base and travel occasionally

• Divide my time between two or three locations

• Move frequently around the country

• I have no clear preference

Select one.

13. What kind of location would you seriously consider?

• A major city

• A medium-sized city

• A small town or village

• A rural or mountain area

• A coastal location

Select up to two.

14. Which parts of Italy would you seriously consider?

• Northern Italy

• Central Italy

• Southern Italy

• Sicily or Sardinia

• Different areas depending on the season

Select all that apply.

15. What would most attract you to living and working in Italy?

• Quality of life and pace of life

• Culture, food and social environment

• Climate and access to nature

• Housing and general cost of living

• Personal, family or professional connections

Select up to three.

16. What could most discourage you from choosing Italy?

• Bureaucracy, visas or residency rules

• Taxation and lack of clarity

• Housing costs or availability

• Transport, healthcare or everyday services

• Language or difficulty integrating locally

Select up to three.

17. What type of accommodation would you prefer while living and working in Italy?

• An entire private home or apartment

• A private room in a shared home

• A serviced apartment or aparthotel

• A coliving residence

• A home I already own or might purchase

Select one.

18. What monthly accommodation budget would you realistically consider?

• Under €750

• €750–€1,249

• €1,250–€1,999

• €2,000–€2,999

• €3,000 or more

Select one.

19. Which services would most influence your choice of location?

• Reliable internet and an appropriate workspace

• Efficient transport and accessibility

• Healthcare and practical everyday services

• Administrative, tax or relocation assistance

• Social, cultural and professional connections

Select up to three.

20. What could most persuade you to stay longer, return regularly or choose Italy over another country?

• Clearer tax and residency rules

• Better access to suitable housing

• Reliable services throughout the year

• Easier integration into local communities

• A coordinated offer for international professionals

Select up to three.

Editorial note

The questionnaire was not designed as an academic study of digital nomadism in Italy. It explored the experiences, expectations and decisions of non-Italian digital nomads and internationally mobile professionals in relation to Italy.

Respondents were drawn from NOMAG’s international audience and selected to reflect, as closely as possible, the profile of that community. Italian readers, representing approximately 41% of NOMAG’s overall audience, were excluded.

The ranking comes from a company that sells flexible offices, so no, we are not treating it as sacred scripture. But Airbnb’s quiet move into London workspace bookings suggests that work, travel and temporary living are becoming part of the same market — whether or not anyone can bear the word “workcation”.

Naples has been named the seventh-best city in the world for a workcation in 2026. Before anyone orders a commemorative plaque, announces the birth of the Mediterranean Silicon Valley or creates a permanent municipal committee on laptop-friendly pizza, there are a few things we should probably mention.

The ranking comes from International Workplace Group, or IWG, which operates thousands of flexible workspaces in more than 120 countries. IWG assessed 50 cities using criteria including climate, culture, accommodation, food, transport, broadband, sustainability and, conveniently enough, the availability of flexible offices.

This is a press release produced by a company with a direct commercial interest in convincing us that people increasingly want to work from places other than their traditional office. We are reporting it, not entering into a blood oath with it.

Asking IWG whether flexible working has a future is slightly like asking a hotel group whether people should travel more, or asking a Neapolitan restaurant whether another pizza might be a good idea. The answer was never going to be a hesitant no.

That does not make the underlying trend imaginary.

IWG’s 2026 ranking places Bangkok first, followed by Tokyo, Barcelona, Porto, Vancouver and Budapest. Naples arrives in seventh place, ahead of Medellín, Lisbon and Seoul. It scores particularly well for culture, food, transport, access to nature and relatively affordable accommodation.

Everyone is free to argue about the order. Rankings of this kind are essentially organised disagreement with a spreadsheet attached. Whether Naples genuinely offers better transport for remote workers than Seoul is a question we shall leave to braver people, preferably those with several free evenings and no fear of social media.

The more important question is why a global office company believes it is worth producing an annual ranking of cities in which people might combine work and travel. The answer is not that the entire professional class has abandoned civilisation to type emails from hammocks. It is that a significant number of people can now move work around their lives in ways that were unusual before 2020.

Remote working fell from its pandemic peak, but it did not disappear. A Stanford-led study of more than 16,000 university-educated workers across 40 countries found that working from home declined between 2022 and 2023 and then broadly stabilised. It remains most common in North America, Britain and Australia, where compatible workers average roughly one and a half to two days away from the employer’s premises each week.

In Great Britain, 28 per cent of working adults were hybrid workers between January and March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics. Among full-time workers the figure was 34 per cent, rising to 36 per cent among people aged 30 to 49. Hybrid work is far from universal and is disproportionately available to better-paid, highly qualified professionals. But it is large enough to reshape services, property and travel.

And then there is Airbnb.

First the bed, now the desk

In July 2026, Airbnb began testing workspace bookings in London with operators Oneder and Work.Life. Customers can book coworking day passes and, at selected locations, private offices and meeting rooms.

Oneder is offering bookings at Kindling in White City and Channel in King’s Cross. A user can reserve a desk for the day, a private office or a room for a meeting without taking out a membership or signing a longer-term agreement.

This is not yet Airbnb conquering the global office market. It is a small London experiment involving a limited number of locations. There is no need to put “the death of the office” in capital letters or invite six futurists onto a panel.

But it is an unusually clear signal.

Airbnb was built around answering one question: where will I stay? It is now experimenting with a second one: where will I work while I am staying there?

For a person spending ten days or three weeks in London, the distinction matters. The kitchen table in a short-term rental may be charming in the photographs and completely unusable once a laptop, charger, coffee cup and human spine are introduced. The sofa may look excellent beneath a carefully positioned blanket while being less effective during a confidential call with a client.

A professional workspace provides reliable internet, a proper chair, a quiet room and, in the best cases, the possibility of meeting another adult without first moving a suitcase from the only available surface.

The commercial logic is straightforward. Until now, travellers booked accommodation on one platform and then searched elsewhere for somewhere to work. Bringing the two together turns workspace into an extension of the stay, much like an airport transfer, a rental car or a local experience.

The office has not vanished. It is being unbundled and sold by the day.

The average hybrid traveller is not an influencer in a hammock

The phrase “digital nomad” tends to produce a very specific image: a young, permanently tanned person staring thoughtfully at a laptop beside an infinity pool, apparently earning money without ever receiving an inconvenient telephone call.

The real market is considerably less photogenic and much larger.

It includes consultants who remain in a city for a few days after meeting a client, employees who travel to see family and work remotely before their holiday begins, founders spending part of the month in another market and professionals who can turn a seven-day trip into a two-week stay by working for four or five of those days.

They are not necessarily trying to escape the office forever. They are trying to avoid choosing between travelling and being productive.

We see this regularly in conversations around NoMag. People are not usually asking how to become full-time nomads. They are asking whether they can stay longer, divide their time differently or find a professional base when they are away from home.

Sometimes they want community. Quite often they simply want a door that closes.

This is why the workspace element matters. Work-from-anywhere sounds wonderful until “anywhere” turns out to be a noisy café with one plug socket, a short-term rental with decorative Wi-Fi or a bedroom in which the only desk is technically a bedside table.

The glamour of location independence can fade rapidly during a video call conducted next to a boiler.

Naples has the raw material. Infrastructure is the actual test

Naples is not an absurd choice for this market. It has international connections, high-speed rail, an extraordinary cultural offer, food that does not require a brand consultancy to explain it and easy access to islands, archaeological sites and the coast. For many international visitors, it is also still cheaper than London, Paris or Barcelona.

The city has something that cannot easily be manufactured: character. Even its inconveniences tend to arrive with a story, although this becomes less charming when the inconvenience involves an internet connection five minutes before a presentation.

The ranking should therefore be treated as an opportunity, not a certificate of completion. Attracting longer-stay professionals requires more than good weather and carbohydrates. It requires reliable broadband, suitable accommodation, bookable workspaces, services in English, predictable transport and a tourism strategy that does not simply convert every available home into a short-term rental.

A city cannot live indefinitely on scenery, international affection and the assumption that visitors will forgive everything because lunch was excellent.

There is also a social question. Workcation travellers and remote professionals often earn salaries set in wealthier cities or countries. Their spending can support local businesses and extend tourism beyond the conventional holiday season. It can also put additional pressure on housing and neighbourhoods if every policy is designed for the temporary visitor and none for the person who actually lives there.

The winner will not necessarily be the city with the prettiest waterfront or the most flattering ranking. It will be the city that can convert temporary interest into a functioning ecosystem without turning itself into a theme park with fibre broadband.

A terrible word for a real market

“Workcation” remains an unpleasant word. It sounds like something invented in a meeting attended by people who describe themselves as passionate about synergies. It also risks suggesting that working beside the sea is automatically a holiday, which is rarely true for either the worker or the people receiving their emails.

But the behaviour it describes is real.

People with sufficient flexibility are extending trips, leaving earlier, returning later and combining periods of work with time spent elsewhere. Employers are using flexibility as part of their talent proposition. Hospitality businesses are beginning to treat a proper desk and verified internet speed as meaningful amenities. Workspace operators are selling offices in smaller units of time. And Airbnb is testing whether the desk can be booked alongside the bed.

That is the story. Not whether Naples deserves precisely seventh place, Bangkok first or Seoul tenth.

The ranking is marketing, and should be read as marketing. The survey reflects particular workers in particular countries. The companies involved have interests, products and ambitions of their own.

Yet dismissing the entire subject because a press release is promotional would be intellectually comfortable and commercially foolish.

Work is becoming less attached to a single building. Travel is becoming less neatly separated from working life. The office is becoming a service that people can use when and where they need it.

Naples may or may not be the seventh-best city in the world from which to answer an email. But the market for people who want to stay longer — provided they can find somewhere decent to open their laptop — is becoming rather difficult to pretend does not exist.

The first mistake many cities make when speaking about talent is assuming that talent is only attracted by incentives. Lower taxes, cheaper offices, faster permits, better slogans, smarter campaigns: all of these may help, but they rarely explain why people choose to stay in a place once the first practical questions have been answered.

The more interesting question is not how a place captures attention. It is how a place becomes part of someone’s professional and intellectual life.

Mendrisio offers an unusually relevant answer to that question because it is not trying to present itself as a global knowledge capital. It does not need the rhetoric of disruption, nor the constant self-assurance of cities permanently announcing their own future. Its strength is quieter and, in many ways, more convincing: it brings together education, architecture, design, research, production, cross-border mobility and a human scale in a way that makes knowledge feel embedded in daily life rather than isolated inside institutions.

This matters because the geography of work has changed. For decades, ambitious people were told to move towards the largest centres of opportunity. The assumption was simple: if you wanted a meaningful career, a serious network, access to ideas and proximity to markets, you had to accept the gravitational pull of major cities. London, Milan, Paris, Zurich, New York and many other familiar destinations became shorthand for possibility.

That logic has not disappeared. Large cities still matter enormously. But their exclusive appeal has weakened. A growing number of founders, professionals, academics, consultants and internationally mobile workers are asking a more nuanced question: where can I be connected to serious opportunities without allowing my entire life to be consumed by the cost, speed and pressure of a large metropolitan centre?

Mendrisio sits precisely at the intersection of that question.

A Small City With An Unusually International Mindset

At first glance, Mendrisio’s scale might suggest a local story. Spend some time there, however, and that perception begins to change. The presence of the Academy of Architecture of the Università della Svizzera italiana gives the city a strong intellectual rhythm. Architecture is not a decorative detail here: it becomes a framework for discussions about space, cities, landscape, heritage, materials and the relationship between built environments and everyday life.

Alongside USI, the wider educational and research ecosystem, including SUPSI – Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana – and its work across environment, construction and design, gives the area a strong applied research dimension. This is not knowledge detached from the territory. It is knowledge that directly engages with housing, infrastructure, mobility, sustainability, manufacturing, public space and the way communities actually function.

That is particularly relevant at a time when many places are trying to define what innovation means beyond software. The next chapter of territorial competitiveness will not be built only by attracting apps, venture capital and coworking spaces. It will also depend on the ability to rethink construction, energy, mobility, public services, education, health, skills and the relationship between people and their surroundings.

In that sense, Mendrisio feels more contemporary than many cities that claim to represent the future.

The Value Of Being Connected Without Being Consumed

Its position reinforces this advantage. Mendrisio is close to Lugano, Zurich, Como, Varese, Milan and Malpensa, but it is not overshadowed by any of them. It belongs to a cross-border economic region where Swiss reliability and Italian dynamism constantly meet, sometimes formally and sometimes through the everyday movement of people, ideas and work.

For professionals and companies, this geography is not abstract. It means access to markets, universities, suppliers, clients, transport connections and international talent without forcing every activity into a single metropolitan centre. A designer can think locally and work internationally. A researcher can remain close to academic networks while living in a smaller community. A business owner can reach major markets while building a daily routine that does not feel permanently stretched to its limits.

This is where smaller knowledge cities may become increasingly important. They do not replace global cities; they complement them. They offer proximity without overload, networks without anonymity, ambition without the constant sense that life must be sacrificed to sustain professional momentum.

A Different Kind Of Innovation Story

Mendrisio’s appeal is also that it does not reduce innovation to a single sector. The local economy sits within a broader ecosystem of manufacturing, high-value production, professional services, education, culture and international trade. That diversity matters because resilient territories are rarely built around a single fashionable industry. They are built through multiple layers of knowledge, skills and connections.

A city with excellent universities but no everyday quality of life struggles to retain people. A place with scenery but no professional opportunity becomes a postcard. A business hub without culture feels transactional. A community without openness becomes isolated. Mendrisio is interesting because it does not claim perfection; instead, it combines enough of the right elements to create a balanced and coherent environment.

Perhaps that is why its story is not easily captured by the usual relocation language. It is not simply cheaper, warmer, faster or trendier than somewhere else. Its proposition is more mature: it offers the conditions in which people can continue to grow professionally without losing connection with the rest of their lives.

For internationally mobile people, that may be one of the most powerful forms of competitiveness. The future of work will not be decided only by where companies open offices. It will also be shaped by the places where people feel engaged, valued, connected and able to build a future.

Mendrisio may not be shouting for attention. But for those listening carefully, it is making a quietly compelling case.

Would you like to know more? Contact welcome@mendrisio.ch or

Visit the Mendreasy website

This article was developed in editorial collaboration with the travel app Polarsteps.

This summer, we didn’t drink Spritz by the sea. We didn’t try to squeeze our beach towels onto a crowded Mediterranean beach. Instead, we spent June and July working and driving around Sweden in our campervan. Spoiler alert: nothing special happened.

Daytime temperatures hovered around 25°C (77°F) and we were mostly alone, surrounded by forests, lakes, and moose. A summer body wasn’t required; aperitivo was replaced with pickled herring and potatoes, and it turned out to be the best decision we could have made.

A choice that almost felt prophetic

Growing up in France, summer had a very specific feeling: salty sea breeze, sunscreen, pine trees, melons, and smoky charcoal… But as I’m writing these words, France is experiencing its fourth historic heatwave of the year. We’ve been watching wildfires and climate-related disasters unfold from afar, heartbroken for the people and wildlife affected. And our childhood definition of summer seems to be disappearing with them.

Looking back, it almost feels as though our choice to skip Western and Southern Europe this summer was prophetic. But it wasn’t. We were hardly alone in looking north. In one recent survey by Polarsteps, 39% of travelers said they were considering a destination with a cooler climate than their home country this summer, rising to 57% in the US. The main reason was to escape extreme heat at home. It was only one survey, but the finding felt familiar.

So here we are in Sweden, wearing jeans and always keeping a rain jacket within arm’s reach.

We didn’t just escape the heat

When people asked why we were heading north (because, yes, it sounded like a punk decision to most of our relatives!), our first answer was always: “to escape the heat”. And that’s partly true. We don’t have air conditioning in our campervan, and once temperatures climb above 25°C, we (and our cats!) struggle to work, sleep, cook, or simply exist.

But once we settled into a Scandinavian summer, we realized we hadn’t just escaped the heat. We’d escaped the crowds, the FOMO, the endless checklist of things you have to see, and the pressure to make every day count.

Sweden didn’t leave us much choice but to slow down. Some days, absolutely nothing happened. Maybe a walk through the forest, or a late-night barbecue. That’s it. Some people would call that boring, but boredom was our greatest luxury.

Summer has become a performance

European summer isn’t just a season. Somewhere between paid holidays becoming the norm and Instagram taking over our lives, it became a status symbol. Then it became content. And without really noticing, we stopped experiencing summer and started performing it.

You need the right body, the right swimsuit, the perfect beach, and the perfect angle to make it look like you had the whole coastline to yourself. Did summer even happen if you didn’t post at least one Spritz a day on your Stories? For decades, Southern Europe sold us the dream of the perfect summer.

This summer, Sweden gave us permission to opt out. To stop performing. To come back with nothing special to say when someone asked about our holiday. To embrace a different kind of luxury: sleeping without air conditioning, eating lunch outside without melting, walking at 4pm without desperately searching for shade, or hearing birds (and moose!) louder than tourists. It reminded us that doing less isn’t failing at summer. It is just enjoying it the way we like it. Cool and calm. Isn’t that the whole point of this country anyway? Balance? It even has a name in Swedish: lagom. Well, something tells me ‘lagom summers’ might be about to have their moment.

Maybe summer is being rewritten

We believe this shift will go far beyond summer vacations, as more people rethink where they want to live and work in a warming world. Climate change is quietly redrawing the map of travel, remote work, and life in general. And maybe that’s also an opportunity to rewrite what we expect from it.

There is a travelling circus moving through Europe’s villages, rural areas and supposedly forgotten territories.

It arrives with a stage, a press office, a programme of panels and the usual collection of words: regeneration, innovation, community, future of work, creative economy, sustainability and, inevitably, digital nomadism.

For two or three days, a place that is difficult to reach, difficult to stay in and often almost impossible to inhabit without a car declares itself the next destination for digital nomads.

Then the circus moves on.

This is not about one particular event (and oh boy we got plenty in mind). It is about an increasingly common format: destinations attempting to reposition themselves for digital nomads without first becoming places where a digital nomad could realistically live.

The logic appears to be simple. The destination is losing residents, tourism is seasonal, property is relatively cheap and the surrounding landscape photographs well. Therefore, digital nomads will come.

But digital nomads do not relocate (the same definition ‘nomad’ says it all) because a village has discovered the correct vocabulary.

They come when they can arrive without undertaking an expedition, find appropriate accommodation for several weeks or months, work reliably, move around, meet people, access essential services and understand how daily life actually functions.

Too many aspiring digital nomad destinations begin at the opposite end. They start with the story.

A festival is announced. Speakers are invited. Journalists arrive. Tourism professionals discuss the future of remote work. Local institutions declare that the territory is ready to attract an international community.

Nobody appears particularly concerned with whether that community can actually get there.

In many of these destinations, public transport is scarce, badly coordinated or nonexistent. Reaching the village from the nearest airport may require several connections and a final taxi journey. Suitable accommodation may be scattered thirty minutes away by car. Long-stay housing has not been organised. Coworking spaces are temporary, symbolic or available only while the event is taking place. Local services are designed for residents who already own cars or tourists staying for two nights.

These are not minor details. They are THE destination.

A picturesque square is not infrastructure. A beautiful landscape is not a mobility system. A panel on co-living does not create available homes. A speech about community does not give a newcomer a place within one.

Without logistics and genuinely habitable places, what is being sold is not a digital nomad destination. It is a tourism discovery experience for people who will visit, take photographs and leave.

That may still have value.

It can promote an area, generate some local spending, fill restaurants for a weekend and persuade a few people to return for a Sunday excursion. A tourism board, a travel agency or an ambitious local association might legitimately organise exactly that.

But it should be described honestly.

It is tourism promotion, not territorial transformation.

The media rarely help to preserve this distinction.

Too many journalists gloriously confuse travelling with nomadism, temporary visibility with regeneration and the arrival of conference guests with the creation of a resident community. A person spending two nights in a village becomes evidence of a new population flow. A panel discussion becomes an ecosystem. A press trip becomes a territorial strategy.

Travel, digital nomadism and regeneration are not interchangeable concepts.

A traveller passes through. A digital nomad temporarily lives and works somewhere. Regeneration requires lasting changes in housing, services, mobility, economic activity and local opportunity.

Confusing the three makes for uplifting articles, but very poor policy.

The story is irresistible: an overlooked village discovers innovation, attracts global talent and prepares to reverse decades of decline. It allows journalists to write about rebirth without returning six months later to see whether anything has actually been born.

Politicians, naturally, rush towards the stage.

What follows is often an orgy of institutional self-congratulation and a parade of wannabe saviours: mayors, regional representatives, consultants, public bodies and project promoters congratulating one another for having placed the village “at the centre of an international conversation”.

The smaller and more vulnerable the place, the grander the announcement.

A weekend initiative becomes a model for Europe. A handful of speakers becomes an international community. A temporary event becomes a new economic trajectory. The village is told that it is about to be reborn through innovation, talent and the future of work.

And the village often believes it. Why would it not?

When residents are leaving, shops are closing and public services are shrinking, even a temporary spotlight can feel like a rescue. Promoters arrive with professional presentations, institutional endorsements, optimistic headlines and, occasionally, access to public funding. They promise international attention and a new population of skilled mobile workers.

The alternative is silence.

But attention is not accessibility, and publicity is not demand.

That is the most uncomfortable contradiction. A territory may announce plans to attract globally mobile professionals while continuing to lose the people who were born there. It presents itself as a future home for outsiders without having created enough opportunity, mobility or services for its existing population to remain.

The new arrivals exist mainly in the presentation slides.

The departures continue to appear in the demographic statistics.

The events themselves are largely stages for static institutions and tourism professionals to discuss mobile lives.

Consultants, destination managers, public officials, journalists and speakers move from town to town explaining how digital nomads might revitalise places in which they themselves would rarely attempt to live for more than a few days.

They speak about mobility while seated beneath stage lights.

They describe the future of remote work in territories where taking a morning flight, finding a month-long rental or reaching a supermarket without a car may require an unreasonable amount of planning.

They talk about attracting people free to live almost anywhere while offering them some of the least practical places in which to live.

These questions require more than storytelling. They require housing inventories, transport solutions, local hosts, property agreements, operational budgets, reliable information and permanent management.

In other words, they require somebody to build the destination before marketing it.

Instead, the marketing often becomes the project.

The organiser receives visibility. The speaker receives another stage. The politician receives another photograph. The institution receives reassuring headlines. The consultant receives another case study. The journalist receives a convenient story about another village being reborn.

Everyone involved in describing the transformation receives something.

Whether the village is transformed is a secondary matter.

In the more fortunate cases, some public funding has been spent, a few local businesses have earned money during the event and the well-intentioned promoters have gained enough visibility to organise the next one.

Perhaps several visitors have been persuaded to return for a day trip.

Perhaps four or five occasional remote workers will stay for a week, cause no particular inconvenience and populate their Instagram feeds with the inevitable laptop at sunset and a spritz in the village square.

Nor is there anything wrong with trying. A modest initiative is better than complete inertia. A well-organised weekend may create relationships, bring some revenue and introduce outsiders to a place they had never considered visiting.

The problem begins when a small tourism event is inflated into evidence of regeneration, repopulation or the birth of a digital nomad destination.

The test should be mercilessly simple.

Six months later, how many remote workers arrived independently of the event?

How long did they stay?

Where did they live?

Could they arrive without a car?

Did any new service become permanent?

Did residents gain jobs, income, customers or meaningful international connections?

Did the village become easier to inhabit?

Did anything remain that did not depend on another conference being organised?

Without answers, the destination has not been transformed.

It has merely been narrated.

And the circus depends on this constant movement. It cannot remain long enough for results to be measured. It must travel to the next village, the next rural district and the next place prepared to declare itself an emerging digital nomad hub.

A new stage is assembled.

The same speakers return.

The same institutional promises are made.

The same media confusion follows.

Another territory is promised rebirth through people who have not been given either a practical reason or a practical way to live there.

The provocation begins with visitors who arrive without a car. But the answer is not to invent services for people who are not there yet. It is to build useful services for residents — making the village naturally more accessible to everyone else.

The provocation from our Editor-in-Chief, (first published on ITS Journal), is very simple: Want digital nomads in your village? Fine. First, help them get there.

And, ideally, allow them to leave again.

Many remote workers arrive in Italy by plane or train. They do not own a car, they have no intention of buying one for a two- or three-month stay, and they quickly discover that renting one can cost almost as much as the apartment.

There is also a minor cultural detail.

Have you ever considered what driving and parking in an Italian hill town looks like to somebody who has just landed?

A road wide enough for one Fiat Panda is officially classified as two-way. Parking requires a steep reverse manoeuvre between a medieval wall and the plumber’s van. The ZTL sign is viewed with respectful uncertainty even by Italians.

Authentic, certainly.

Not necessarily inviting.

But turning this observation into yet another special programme “for digital nomads” would miss the point completely.

The point is the opposite.

Do not invent artificial services for people who are not there yet. Use their perspective to see more clearly what is already missing for the people who live there.

When a service works for older residents, young people, one-car households, disabled people and those on lower incomes, it will automatically make the village more accessible to remote workers, new residents and visitors.

For a visitor it is inconvenient. For a resident it can be a prison

For a digital nomad, poor transport may mean choosing another destination.

For somebody who already lives there, it may mean being unable to buy food, reach a doctor, accept a job, attend education or maintain an independent life.

There are older residents who no longer drive, people who never obtained a licence, young adults who cannot afford a vehicle and households where the only car is used every day by the family member who works.

Even an unimpressive old car now costs several thousand euros. Then come insurance, tax, maintenance, tyres and fuel — which now costs more than wine. Almost twice as much, depending on which Eurospin shelf we use as our economic benchmark.

The European Commission now explicitly recognises transport poverty: the inability to access affordable, adequate mobility for employment, education, healthcare and essential services. Rural, remote and poorly connected areas are among those most exposed.

Across many small communities, this lack of mobility is currently hidden by an informal network of relatives, friends and neighbours.

When the neighbour is available, the system works.

When they are working, ill, away, tired or simply unwilling to become the village’s unpaid taxi service, it stops working.

Neighbourly generosity is valuable.

It should not be a municipality’s transport policy.

Permanent dependence on favours also removes privacy and autonomy. People have to explain where they are going, why, at what time and when they intend to return.

Buying groceries or attending a medical appointment becomes a personal negotiation.

A village can be beautiful and still be a prison.

Do not build a showroom village for people who have not arrived

In recent years, many territories have treated digital-nomad attraction mainly as a communications exercise.

A website in English. Sunset photography. Four desks in an unused municipal room, a coffee machine and the word coworking.

The village is then declared ready to welcome the world.

But the world still has to reach it.

A railway station twenty-five kilometres away is not genuinely accessible when no service connects with the trains.

An airport ninety minutes away is not especially useful when the only option is a taxi costing more than the flight.

A supermarket twelve kilometres away is not “nearby” when somebody must carry water, detergent and food along a provincial road.

Accessibility is not measured in kilometres on a map. It is measured by the time, cost and complexity involved in covering them without owning a car.

The European Commission recognises a significant rural mobility deficit and recommends combining public, social and private finance while integrating shared solutions with the main public-transport network.

That is the change in perspective:

do not create a service for digital nomads. Allow their presence to contribute to the viability of a service designed primarily for the community.

Sometimes the entire mobility strategy is one car

Villerouge-Termenès is a French municipality of around 140 residents, located far from major shops and specialised healthcare.

Its solution was remarkably simple: a shared municipal electric car, charged beneath a photovoltaic canopy and bookable by residents for journeys generally ranging from 40 to 80 kilometres.

It is used for markets, grocery shopping, medical care and errands that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.

The project cost €46,355 and received substantial European and territorial public support. The vehicle reached approximately 30,000 kilometres per year, and demand eventually revealed the limitations of a single small car: insufficient passenger and luggage capacity and periods when the service became saturated.

This does not prove that every rural shared car can pay for itself.

It proves that, in the right territory, one car can be genuinely useful.

Official Villerouge-Termenès project

Extended description and financing

Allons: a car managed through municipal social services

Allons is a small municipality at the end of a sparsely populated valley, far from major shops and public services.

In 2025, the municipality acquired a shared electric vehicle and placed it under the management of its local social-assistance centre. Residents can hire it at a modest cost for short journeys.

The project was financed through France’s Green Fund, support from the Verdon Regional Natural Park and municipal resources. As the service is recent, there is not yet enough evidence to judge whether its ongoing operation can become independent of public contributions.

The principle is important: the car is not treated as a tourism gadget. It sits within the local social-support system.

Official Allons case on France Mobilités

Pays de Lumbres: not only cars, but rural mobility stations

The Pays de Lumbres is a rural French territory covering 36 municipalities and approximately 24,000 residents.

Its experiment expanded into seven mobility stations, seven electric vehicles and eighteen e-bikes. The system is complemented by a solidarity-transport service involving volunteer drivers, including support for people on low incomes or unable to drive.

The mobility-station project had a declared total budget of approximately €420,000 excluding solidarity transport, with at least €247,383 coming from national, departmental, agricultural-social-insurance and municipal funding.

The original experiment used an extremely low tariff. When a charge of €1 per hour was introduced in 2019, usage declined — a useful reminder that some users choose the service precisely because they cannot afford the costs of owning a car.

Official mobility-stations page

Original rural car-sharing experiment

Italy: demand-responsive transport in Val Degano

Italy also has services designed for genuinely mountainous, sparsely populated territories.

UDonDemand, operated by TPL FVG, connects municipalities in Val Degano during periods and in locations that receive limited or no conventional scheduled service. It allows residents of isolated hamlets to reach interchange stops for the regular connections between Sappada and Tolmezzo.

Journeys can be booked through an app or by telephone — essential if digitisation is not to become another barrier for people with limited technical confidence.

Official UDonDemand information

Demand-responsive transport does not necessarily remove the need for subsidy. It can, however, avoid sending large, nearly empty buses around rigid routes, concentrating resources on journeys people actually request.

One shared car for ten apartments may be worth more than ten slogans

The municipality does not necessarily have to own the vehicle.

A company, cooperative or property operator managing several homes could provide a small shared car for tenants and guests.

Imagine ten or fifteen apartments in the same village. Their listings probably include one polite but decisive sentence:

A car is essential.

That sentence immediately excludes a substantial group of potential tenants.

Instead, the operator could offer access to a small bookable vehicle. A limited number of hours might be included in the rental, with additional use paid per journey or through a weekly mobility package.

There is no need to assign one car to every home.

Many users would require it only for grocery shopping, the railway station, an appointment or an evening in the next town.

A single vehicle shared between several properties could make homes genuinely rentable that are not truly usable without mobility.

The product would no longer be simply:

Apartment with Wi-Fi.

It would become:

Apartment with access to mobility.

The same vehicle could be opened to residents when guests are not using it.

The municipality could purchase blocks of hours for people facing hardship. Accommodation providers could buy station-transfer journeys. A supermarket, pharmacy or medical centre could contribute because the car enables customers and patients to reach them.

People arriving from outside would therefore help support a service for those already there.

That is territorial attractiveness.

Not building scenery for foreigners, but using new demand to make the village stronger.

Car sharing does not help somebody who cannot drive

A shared vehicle solves only part of the problem.

It helps people who hold a licence, are physically able to drive and feel confident on local roads.

It does not automatically help a very old person, somebody whose disability prevents driving or anyone who never obtained a licence.

They also need a driver.

Sopotniki is a Slovenian organisation providing free transport for older rural residents through dedicated vehicles and professionally coordinated volunteers.

The service operates across 17 municipalities, supports more than 6,370 active older users, involves approximately 310 volunteer drivers and delivers around 13,000 journeys per year. Funding comes from national and European public programmes, municipalities and private partnerships.

Its success does not rely on goodwill alone. It depends on coordination, training, management, technology, insurance and clearly allocated responsibility.

That is the difference between a service and hoping a neighbour has time.

Official Sopotniki case – European Rural Pact

Sopotniki service in Brežice

Can these services survive without public funding?

The honest answer is: rarely, at least not entirely.

Villerouge-Termenès required substantial public support for its initial investment.

Allons was launched with national, territorial and municipal funding.

The Pays de Lumbres used public finance to create its network.

Sopotniki provides free journeys through volunteers, municipalities, European programmes and private partners.

Guidance published by the UK Department for Transport in 2025 is explicit: particularly in rural areas, demand-responsive services are unlikely to be commercially profitable and normally require sustained local-authority or external support.

But not being commercially profitable is not the same as being unsustainable or pointless.

A rural road is not required to generate a profit.

Street lighting is not switched off because each lamp fails to produce revenue.

A nearly empty conventional bus route does not become rational merely because it has existed for thirty years.

The correct question is not:

How much profit does the car make?

It is:

• How many people can reach healthcare?

• How many essential journeys are completed?

• How many residents regain independence?

• How many homes become genuinely liveable or rentable?

• How many customers can reach local businesses?

• What is the cost per journey compared with the alternatives?

• How much is saved by avoiding oversized services and empty routes?

Considering the amount of public money sometimes spent on oversized infrastructure, consultancy, unused platforms and routes designed for a world that no longer exists, funding one or two small shared cars does not seem extravagant.

It looks like the minimum.

Who should pay?

No single organisation needs to cover the entire cost.

The municipality can fund the launch, buy hours for vulnerable users or cover socially necessary journeys.

Property owners and operators can contribute because the service increases the accessibility and practical value of their homes.

Agriturismi, distributed hotels and holiday rentals can buy packages for guests and station transfers.

Pharmacies, supermarkets, local businesses and employers can participate because they gain customers, patients or workers.

Users can pay an affordable charge, possibly differentiated between visitor, ordinary and social use.

Public programmes can support the initial vehicle, technology or journeys for people with fewer resources.

The most credible model is not one with no public funding whatsoever.

It is a mixed model with transparent costs and measurable results.

Start with one vehicle, not a platform

A pilot for a small village could begin with:

one car;

one collection point;

a simple booking system;

a block of hours purchased by the municipality;

several property owners contributing to the monthly cost;

a tariff for visitors and ordinary users;

a small organised driver network for people unable to drive;

and a telephone number alongside any app.

After twelve months, measure usage, costs, unmet requests, medical journeys, shopping trips, station connections and the number of people who would otherwise have had no option.

When demand justifies a second vehicle, add it.

Not before.

An empty fleet, an unused bicycle rack and an app downloaded by twelve people are not innovation.

They are digital street furniture.

Digital nomads are the test. Residents are the reason

People arriving from outside immediately see what residents have learned to consider normal.

A resident knows which neighbour to call. They know that the 7:20 bus actually passes at 7:12. They know the unofficial taxi driver who may be available, unless it is market day, a wedding or a football match.

The visitor searches online.

They discover that the bus does not connect with the train, the taxi costs €140 and the supermarket cannot safely be reached on foot.

Then they choose another place.

They do not write to the mayor.

They do not begin a public debate.

They simply do not arrive.

Digital nomads are therefore an excellent stress test.

But the response should not be a fake service created to seduce them.

It should be a real service, designed for people already living in the territory and made more viable by those who may arrive.

Fast internet matters.

Affordable housing matters.

A coworking space may occasionally matter too.

But quality of life begins with the ability to buy food, reach a doctor, catch a train and see other people without requesting a favour every time.

So yes: want digital nomads?

First, help them get there.

More importantly, allow the people already living in your village to leave their homes.

From provocation to pilot

NOMAG does not want this discussion to end with an article.

Building on our direct experience in a small Italian community, we want to speak with people and organisations possessing practical expertise in rural car sharing, fleet management, insurance, regulation, vehicle-booking and access technology, community transport, public-private partnerships and rural funding.

We are not looking for another presentation about smart mobility.

We are looking for people willing to help determine whether a small, mixed and replicable model can work in the real world.

Links and sources

• European Commission – Access to transport for all

• European Commission – Sustainable rural mobility guidance

• Villerouge-Termenès – official project

• Villerouge-Termenès – extended financing case

• Allons – shared municipal vehicle

• Pays de Lumbres – mobility stations

• Pays de Lumbres – original rural car-sharing experiment

• Sopotniki – European Rural Pact case

• Sopotniki – Brežice service

• Val Degano – UDonDemand

• UK Department for Transport – Demand-responsive transport guidance

Countries invent visas for them, cities build coworking spaces for them and villages promise them an authentic life among olive trees. There is only one minor problem: almost nobody has bothered to ask who they are, what they need or whether the local population genuinely wants them around.

In What Women Want, Mel Gibson needs lightning, a hairdryer and a near-death experience before he can finally hear women’s thoughts. Governments, tourism boards and local councils have developed a less hazardous method for understanding digital nomads: they simply make things up.

Every few weeks, another country introduces or adjusts a digital nomad visa, another city declares itself a remote-working hub and another half-empty village discovers that it possesses stone houses, grandmothers, olive trees and something the local councillor confidently describes as “excellent Wi-Fi”. The OECD confirms that governments are continuing to introduce these schemes — Italy and Türkiye did so in 2024, Bulgaria followed in 2025, while Croatia extended its programme — although it also notes that they remain relatively small-volume migration channels.

Then comes the inevitable announcement: we want to attract digital nomads.

Wonderful. Which ones? Why would they come? What exactly would they do there once the ceremonial photograph with the mayor had been taken? More importantly, has anyone spoken to an actual digital nomad, rather than to a consultant whose direct experience of nomadism consists of opening a MacBook during a weekend in Barcelona?

The world’s favourite imaginary population

Digital nomads have become the urban and rural development equivalent of truffle oil. Sprinkle the expression over an ordinary project and it immediately sounds modern, international and vaguely expensive. An abandoned school becomes a “nomad hub”; a room containing three IKEA desks becomes a coworking centre; an unreliable internet connection becomes “an opportunity to reconnect with yourself”; and a village with no evening bus, no pharmacy and one bar that closes whenever the owner feels tired becomes “an oasis for conscious professionals”.

The digital nomad in this fantasy is young, single, permanently cheerful and able to manage an international software company from a deckchair. He — because the cliché is usually male — owns one backpack, wears shorts during investor calls and requires only four things: a laptop, a cappuccino, a panoramic view and a wall bearing the neon instruction DO WHAT YOU LOVE. He never needs a doctor, a printer, childcare, privacy, a second monitor, decent heating or somewhere to buy food on a Sunday.

Reality is considerably less decorative. MBO Partners’ 2025 research estimates that the United States alone has 18.5 million digital nomads, representing roughly 12 per cent of the American workforce. More importantly, 11.2 million of them have conventional salaried jobs, rather than fitting the freelance-backpacker stereotype; 54 per cent are married or living with a partner, and around one in nine is aged 55 or over. They work across technology, finance, consulting, sales, marketing, research and creative industries.

The MBO research is American rather than global, and it should not be treated as a perfect portrait of every nomad on Earth. That limitation, however, reinforces the central point: even within one country, this is not a single tribe. It includes graduates on modest incomes, highly paid executives, founders, freelancers, couples, parents, older professionals, domestic travellers, international travellers and people taking a temporary workation before returning home. Calling all of them “digital nomads” tells us approximately as much as calling everyone who owns a suitcase “a traveller”.

The question nobody asks

Territories usually begin with the wrong question: how can we attract digital nomads? It sounds strategic, looks excellent on a conference slide and is almost entirely meaningless. The useful question is much less flattering: which specific kinds of digital nomad could genuinely want the life we are capable of offering, and what would make that life function once the promotional video ends?

That extra sentence destroys approximately 80 per cent of municipal PowerPoint presentations. A large city with international flights, nightlife, universities and several professional communities may appeal to a newly remote employee who wants energy, opportunity and connections. A coastal town could attract a couple seeking three quieter months without disappearing completely from civilisation. A mountain village might appeal to an experienced slow traveller, a writer completing a book, a founder preparing a launch, a family wanting nature or someone who actively enjoys solitude.

The same village may be completely unsuitable for a corporate executive who must return to London twice a month, a parent who needs an international school, a single 25-year-old hoping to meet other people or anyone who interprets the phrase “the last bus leaves at 5.20” as a threat rather than a charming expression of local identity. “Digital nomads” cannot be a target market until someone decides which digital nomads they are talking about. Until then, it is not a strategy. It is a hashtag with a municipal budget.

No, they do not simply want Wi-Fi

Reliable internet is essential, obviously. Inviting a remote worker to live with unstable connectivity is like inviting a chef to use a kitchen without electricity and compensating them with a beautiful sunset. Yet broadband alone is no longer an attraction; it is the entrance ticket. Advertising a destination because it has Wi-Fi is increasingly like advertising a hotel because it has doors.

A 2025 study based on a survey of 101 digital nomads from 26 countries found that their five leading destination criteria were digital connectivity, quality of life, cost of living, safety and visa or entry conditions. The sample is relatively small and was recruited online, so its percentages should not be mistaken for eternal universal truths. Nevertheless, its findings align with broader research showing that destination choice is shaped by a mixture of infrastructure, affordability, legal simplicity and the quality of ordinary life, rather than by scenery alone.

A separate 2024 academic study analysed digital nomads’ online discussions and found that cultural immersion, gastronomy, coworking and employment opportunities contributed positively to destination perceptions, while poor connectivity, visa problems, awkward working hours and loneliness operated as significant barriers. The study’s most useful conclusion is not that nomads possess a secret checklist, but that emotional well-being and social connection matter alongside technological infrastructure.

In practical terms, digital nomads need a life that does not require a daily administrative expedition. They need accommodation in which “workspace” does not mean a decorative shelf beneath the television, a chair designed for a human spine, enough electrical sockets to power something more advanced than a bedside lamp, heating in winter, cooling in summer and photographs that bear some relationship to the property they eventually enter.

They need medium-term housing without hotel prices, twelve-month contracts or a landlord demanding three payslips, two guarantors, a letter from an employer, a blood sample and evidence that their grandfather paid rent punctually in 1963. They need food shops, healthcare, public transport, exercise, somewhere to work and somewhere to stop working. In other words, they need many of the same things permanent residents need, which continues to arrive as astonishing news to tourism departments.

They want community, but not compulsory fun

One of the most persistent myths in digital nomad policy is that opening a coworking space automatically creates a community. It does not. It creates a room, and quite often a room containing uncomfortable chairs, motivational quotations and nobody else.

A functioning community requires introductions, repeated encounters, activities, local connectors and some plausible reason for people to see one another again. It also requires residents who are interested in meeting newcomers and newcomers who are treated as potential participants in local life rather than temporary cash machines. None of this is achieved by organising one “nomad aperitivo” beneath a banner carrying seventeen sponsor logos and requiring everyone to introduce themselves with their name, nationality and personal brand.

Digital nomads are not exchange students trapped in a permanent orientation week. Some want professional networking, some want friendships, some want collaborators and some simply want to recognise a few faces in the café and know whom to call when the boiler begins making demonic noises. What many of them do not want is complete isolation rebranded as peace and tranquillity.

A study published online in late 2024, based on 30 in-depth interviews with digital nomads, described loneliness not as an inevitable condition but as a continuum influenced by social support, the ability to stay somewhere long enough to develop relationships and the individual’s capacity to connect with others. In other words, installing fast broadband may allow someone to attend a Zoom meeting, but it will not automatically give them a reason to remain in the town after closing the laptop.

MBO’s wider 2025 research reaches a similar conclusion from a different direction. Among the challenges most frequently reported by American nomads were separation from friends and family, financial pressure, concerns about personal safety, travel burnout, inconvenient time zones and loneliness. The glamorous lifestyle apparently consists of freedom, adventure and occasionally trying to conduct a board meeting from an apartment where the router has decided to enter a period of spiritual reflection.

The great village delusion

Small towns and villages are particularly attracted to the digital nomad story because the arithmetic appears irresistible. The village is losing population, houses are empty and remote workers can supposedly live anywhere; therefore, remote workers will move into the empty houses. Unfortunately, “anywhere” has never meant “everywhere”.

Peer-reviewed European research published in 2025 concluded that the expansion of teleworking was unlikely, by itself, to produce a major rebalancing between urban and rural areas. People’s location choices remain connected to employment ecosystems, services, amenities, family networks and other advantages concentrated around cities. Remote work can loosen the rope tying people to a particular office, but it does not erase the rest of their lives.

A 2026 working paper using data from more than 7,400 European remote workers makes the point even more brutally. It reports that 67 per cent of remote-work-related relocations occurred from one urban area to another, while moves from urban to rural areas accounted for only 2 per cent. Quality of life was cited by 78 per cent of movers and economic or housing considerations by 70 per cent. Because this is a recent working paper rather than a final peer-reviewed publication, those precise figures deserve some caution, but they provide little support for the fantasy of millions of laptop workers stampeding towards every picturesque hamlet with an empty primary school.

This does not mean rural destinations cannot attract nomads. It means that a stone alley, three vacant houses and a population problem do not automatically constitute a product. A successful rural destination has to identify the people who might actively value what it offers and then remove the practical reasons preventing those people from staying.

Can the village be reached without buying a car? Can someone find a comfortable furnished home for six weeks rather than two nights or twelve months? Is there a supermarket, a doctor and somewhere to eat on a Tuesday evening in February? Can a partner build a life there too? Can children attend school or childcare? Will residents still speak to newcomers after the official welcome event, and when everyone proudly says, “In our village, everybody knows everybody”, does that sound like community — or surveillance with geraniums?

Cheap is attractive. Depressed is not.

Cost matters, particularly to freelancers, younger workers and people using differences in living costs to sustain a more flexible lifestyle. Nevertheless, there is a substantial difference between affordable and lifeless. A destination cannot remove every service, opportunity and form of entertainment and then market the resulting absence as “slow living”.

Low prices may attract initial attention, but nomads evaluate the complete package: housing quality, mobility, safety, weather, healthcare, bureaucracy, social opportunities, legal conditions and access to other destinations. A £400 flat is not a bargain when it comes with mould, no desk, no heating and a three-hour journey to the nearest airport. A cheap village is not attractive to an executive who must spend hundreds of pounds and an entire day reaching a monthly meeting, nor to a parent who has to drive 50 kilometres for childcare.

“Authenticity” is equally unreliable as a substitute for functioning services. Nomads may genuinely want to experience local culture, learn the language, eat regional food and participate in community life. What they probably do not want is to discover that “authenticity” means every shop closes between 1pm and 5pm, the only available rental contains furniture from a deceased aunt and the internet technician is expected “sometime next month”.

Authenticity is wonderful. So is a pharmacy.

They increasingly want to stop moving

The word nomad encourages destinations to imagine people in constant motion, collecting countries, airport stamps and photographs of laptops beside swimming pools. Many real nomads eventually discover that moving every few days is not liberation but unpaid logistics.

MBO’s 2025 report identifies a continued shift towards “slomading”: visiting fewer destinations and remaining in each for longer. Its respondents visited an average of 6.2 locations in 2025, down from 7.2 in 2023, while the average stay increased from 5.4 to 6.4 weeks. The report links longer stays with better productivity, stronger social lives, more meaningful contact with local culture and lower travel stress.

This change should transform how destinations think about the market. Someone staying for six or eight weeks is not merely a tourist who happens to own a laptop. They need to live, which means predictable monthly pricing, laundry, cooking facilities, privacy, workspace, exercise, social relationships and the possibility of becoming temporarily familiar with a place.

They may buy local food, use local services, attend events, learn some of the language, invite family members to visit and return the following year. They may contribute more to the ordinary economy than a weekend tourist. But they can only become temporary citizens when the destination allows them to participate in local life, rather than treating them as unusually productive hotel guests who should remain grateful for every cappuccino.

Your citizens also get a vote

Destinations frequently discuss digital nomads as though only the visitors’ preferences matter. They do not. The people who already live there have homes, expectations, frustrations and votes, and their reaction can determine whether a nomad strategy becomes genuine integration or simply another local conflict with better branding.

A study involving 307 digital nomads across four established destinations found that conflict with residents could weaken nomads’ identification with a place and their desire to return. It also found that cooperative contact and practical support from residents could reduce some of those negative effects. The conclusion is not that locals must smile obediently while rents rise, nor that newcomers should be welcomed regardless of their behaviour. It is that relationships between nomads and residents must be deliberately designed into the project rather than treated as an automatic by-product of proximity.

Before advertising a town as a nomad destination, local leaders should therefore ask residents some uncomfortable questions. Do they want medium-term newcomers? Are landlords likely to remove homes from the long-term rental market? Will local businesses adapt their opening hours or simply increase their prices? Are nomads expected to integrate, spend money and participate, or merely to sit silently in the new coworking centre as evidence that the funding application was successful?

There is also the delicate matter of personality. Digital nomads are often independent, impatient with bureaucracy and accustomed to comparing cities, services and countries. They ask why the bus does not run, why broadband disappears during working hours, why the municipal website was last updated in 2017 and why obtaining a document requires four appointments with three offices that disagree with one another. This may be useful pressure for improvement, or it may irritate everybody within a five-kilometre radius. Usually, it does both.

So, what do digital nomads really want?

They want freedom, but not chaos; adventure, but also a chair that does not damage their lower back; affordable living, but not a house furnished entirely with objects rejected by three previous generations. They want community, but not organised happiness; local culture, but not to be displayed beside it; nature, but perhaps also a gym, a train station, decent coffee and somewhere to eat after 9pm.

They want legal clarity without having to read a 94-page government PDF whose English translation appears to have been completed by a distracted toaster. They want to feel welcome, but not to be blamed six months later for every rent increase, crowded café and unfamiliar face. They want choice, flexibility and a destination that understands they are working, not enjoying a 365-day holiday financed by mysterious internet money.

Most importantly, they probably do not want what you imagine they want when you have never tried the lifestyle, never worked for a month from an unfamiliar place and never asked anyone who has. They are young workers, middle-aged executives, freelancers, founders, couples, single people, families, people travelling internationally and people remaining relatively close to home. Some want a tropical social hub; others want a silent room in the mountains. Some are trying to build companies; others are trying to recover from them.

The one-size-fits-all strategy and the purely American image of a young man coding beside a swimming pool are therefore your worst enemies. They prevent you from seeing both the variety of the market and the limits of your own destination.

Before launching another visa, village, hub, residency programme, platform or promotional film featuring a woman inexplicably typing on a beach, ask yourself three final questions.

Do you truly know which digital nomads you are talking about?

Are you quite sure that your town can give them what they need?

And, most importantly, are you and your residents absolutely certain that you want creatures like us hanging around, questioning your transport, occupying the best table in the café for four hours, requesting invoices, demanding functioning Wi-Fi and asking why nothing can be done online?

Because attracting digital nomads is the easy part. Living with us may be the real adventure.

Research note and sources

This article draws on a combination of peer-reviewed academic research, institutional reporting, industry surveys and one recent European working paper. None of these sources, taken individually, can define a single universal digital-nomad profile — which is precisely one of the article’s arguments. MBO Partners’ research is limited to the United States; the Trihas and Papadaki study uses a relatively small convenience sample; qualitative studies provide depth rather than statistical representativeness; and the 2026 European relocation analysis remains a working paper rather than a peer-reviewed publication. What matters is the convergence across different sources: digital nomads are more diverse than the familiar stereotype, while connectivity, housing, quality of life, affordability, safety, social relationships, legal clarity and relations with local residents repeatedly influence where they go and whether they stay.

Sources

1. OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025 — Recent Developments in Migration Policy. Used for recent developments in digital-nomad visa programmes, including those introduced or modified by Italy, Türkiye, Bulgaria and Croatia, and for the OECD’s observation that these remain relatively small-volume migration channels.

2. MBO Partners, 2025 Digital Nomads Trends Report: A Niche Workforce Becomes Mainstream. Used for estimates of the American digital-nomad population, employment status, age and relationship profiles, reported lifestyle challenges and the shift towards longer stays in fewer destinations. The report estimates 18.5 million American digital nomads in 2025, of whom 11.2 million held conventional jobs; 54 per cent were married or living with a partner. It also reports an average of 6.2 destinations and 6.4 weeks per stop in 2025.

3. Nikolaos Trihas and Eirini Papadaki, “Digital Nomads: Lifestyle, Travel Behavior, and the Work/Leisure Balance”, in Strategic Innovative Marketing and Tourism, Springer, 2025. Based on an online survey of 101 digital nomads from 26 countries, the study identifies connectivity, quality of life, cost of living, safety and visa policy as the five leading destination-selection criteria. The authors explicitly acknowledge the limitations created by the sample’s size and recruitment through social media.

4. Francisco Javier S. Lacárcel, Raquel Huete and Konstantina Zerva, “Decoding Digital Nomad Destination Decisions Through User-Generated Content”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 200, 2024. The study analyses online discussions and identifies cultural immersion, gastronomy, coworking and employment-related themes as positive influences, while connectivity problems, visa management, difficult working hours and loneliness emerge as barriers.

5. Cristina Miguel, Christoph Lutz, Rodrigo Perez-Vega and Filip Majetić, “‘Alone on the Road’: Loneliness Among Digital Nomads and the Use of Social Media to Foster Personal Relationships”, Media, Culture & Society, first published online in 2024. Based on 30 in-depth interviews, the study presents digital-nomad loneliness as a continuum affected by social support, length of stay and the ability to establish meaningful connections.

6. Pui-Hang Wong, Karima Kourtit and Peter Nijkamp, “The Teleworking Paradox: The Geography of Residential Mobility of Workers in Pandemic Times”, The Annals of Regional Science, 2025. Using large-scale European survey data, the authors find little evidence that teleworking alone will substantially narrow urban–rural disparities, because residential decisions continue to be shaped by place-specific economic and quality-of-life factors.

7. Sławomir Kuźmar, From Core to Periphery? Assessing Remote Work’s Potential to Rebalance EU Regional Development, working paper, 2026. Based on survey data from more than 7,400 European remote workers collected in 2024, the paper reports that 67 per cent of relocations remained urban-to-urban, while urban-to-rural moves represented 2 per cent. As a recent working paper, its findings should be treated as provisional rather than definitive.

8. Dario Miocevic, “Baby Come Back: Resident–Digital Nomad Conflicts, Destination Identification, and Revisit Intention”, Journal of Travel Research, first published online in 2024. Drawing on a multinational sample of 307 digital nomads across four destinations, the study finds that conflict with residents can weaken identification with a destination, while cooperative contact and practical support can reduce some of those effects.

Sources and figures last checked on 29 July 2026.

The relocation grant attracts the headlines, but Tulsa Remote has lasted since 2018 because the money is only the entrance ticket to a much broader civic, professional and economic ecosystem. While much of Europe remains mesmerised by cheap houses, tax discounts and one-off incentives, Tulsa has concentrated on the considerably harder question: what happens after people arrive?

Let us admit it: many of us knew Tulsa primarily, perhaps exclusively, through Tulsa King, the television series in which Sylvester Stallone plays a New York mafia capo exiled to Oklahoma and proceeds to build a new criminal enterprise with the sort of efficiency rarely encountered in conventional regional-development policy.

Hands up. Guilty as charged.

Tulsa, in the European imagination, is not usually filed alongside New York, San Francisco, Austin or even Nashville. It is somewhere in the middle of America, in the middle of Oklahoma, in the middle of that vast geographical space that international visitors tend to cross at 35,000 feet while watching a film about New York, San Francisco, Austin or Nashville.

That relative invisibility is partly what makes Tulsa Remote so interesting. Since 2018, the city has been deliberately recruiting remote workers from elsewhere in the United States, offering selected applicants a relocation grant, workspace, practical support, professional connections and access to a substantial community of people who have already made the same move. The programme welcomed its 4,000th member in January 2026, having started with a first cohort of just 70 people.

The predictable headline is that Tulsa gives people $10,000 to move there. It is a very good headline, which is presumably why almost everybody uses it. It is also an increasingly inadequate description of what the programme has become.

The grant may prompt an application, but it cannot explain why the initiative has survived for more than seven years, expanded from dozens of participants to thousands and reported an 80 per cent two-year retention rate among its 2025 survey respondents. Nor can it explain why 96 per cent of participants complete the initial year and why a large majority choose to remain after the contractual reason for staying has expired.

The more consequential story is not that Tulsa found a price at which some people would move to Oklahoma. Almost every place can attract temporary attention by attaching cash to a press release. The more consequential story is that Tulsa attempted to build the conditions under which newcomers might develop careers, friendships, businesses, routines and a sufficiently convincing life not to leave again.

This is not a scheme devised by a nearly deserted village offering a symbolic house, a municipal key and best wishes for the restoration of a roof last inspected in 1957. Tulsa had an estimated population of 416,209 in July 2025. It is a proper city, with universities, hospitals, aerospace, energy, finance, manufacturing, cultural institutions and a metropolitan economy large enough to offer more than picturesque isolation and a weekly bus.

That distinction matters because the programme is not trying to use remote workers as emergency demographic decoration. It is positioning them inside an existing city and, more ambitiously, inside an evolving economic ecosystem.

The grant is marketing. The ecosystem is the proposition

Tulsa Remote is backed by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a large philanthropic organisation with the financial capacity and local commitment to operate less like a short-term sponsor and more like a patient civic investor. The programme selects people who already have portable employment outside Oklahoma and encourages them to relocate without requiring the city first to persuade their employers to move as well.

The logic is simple, but rather more sophisticated than it initially appears. Conventional economic development frequently involves offering tax concessions, land, infrastructure and public money to a company in exchange for a promise to create jobs. Sometimes this works very well. Sometimes the jobs arrive late, in smaller numbers than advertised or accompanied by public costs that remain discreetly outside the celebratory press release.

Tulsa Remote reverses the process. Instead of recruiting the employer and hoping the employees follow, it recruits workers who already have employers, salaries and professional networks elsewhere. The salary continues to be financed by an external company or client, while a meaningful share of the worker’s spending, tax contribution, housing demand and social activity is transferred to Tulsa.

In effect, the city imports payroll without first importing the corporate headquarters.

By the end of 2025, Tulsa Remote’s 3,972 participants had collectively generated an estimated $878 million in direct employment income since the programme began. This figure should be read carefully: it is not the programme’s profit, nor is it a calculation of money spent exclusively within Tulsa. It is the total employment income earned by participating remote workers. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the scale of the economic capacity that has been attracted into the city.

An independent 2025 study by economist Timothy J. Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute concluded that the programme’s economic effects extend beyond the participants themselves. The research examined whether the incentive genuinely induced moves that would not otherwise have happened and found that Tulsa Remote members create additional local spending, fiscal benefits, business activity and employment. Crucially, Bartik argued that the programme’s support services, entrepreneurship incentives and surrounding housing and development policies are at least as important as the relocation payment and the participant-selection process.

That conclusion should be printed in very large letters above the desk of every policymaker who believes regional development consists of announcing an incentive and waiting for economic life to occur.

The cash is not irrelevant. It reduces the cost and perceived risk of relocation, creates publicity and supplies a clear reason to consider a city that might otherwise never enter a remote worker’s search. But its usefulness depends on what follows. Without professional opportunities, accessible housing, social connections, cultural life, services and a credible sense of momentum, a relocation payment merely subsidises a temporary change of address.

Tulsa Remote appears to understand this. New members receive individual support, access to a network of more than 4,000 remote workers, a dedicated online community, events and introductions to local organisations and residents. The official programme is explicit that its purpose is not simply to facilitate arrival but to build long-term attachment.

This is where the Tulsa model moves beyond the familiar incentive economy. A financial offer can acquire an applicant. It cannot, on its own, produce belonging.

A programme embedded in something larger

The most important feature of Tulsa Remote may be that it does not stand alone. It forms part of a broader attempt to develop Tulsa’s economic identity, talent base and innovation infrastructure through a combination of philanthropy, business, local institutions and public-private collaboration.

The George Kaiser Family Foundation has also supported Tulsa Innovation Labs, an organisation working across areas including energy technology, advanced mobility, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing. The city has developed startup support, workforce programmes, incubation, coworking, professional communities and spaces designed to connect entrepreneurs, researchers, employers and investors.

Gradient, formerly known as 36 Degrees North, operates as a hub for entrepreneurs and growing companies, providing workspace, incubation, acceleration, mentorship and business support. Tulsa Remote participants do not therefore arrive in a city whose entire economic-development strategy consists of having successfully persuaded them to arrive. They enter a landscape in which several organisations are attempting to convert talent into longer-term business and professional activity.

Not every remote worker will establish a company, join a technology venture or become a civic leader. Nor should they. One of the more exhausting habits of contemporary economic policy is the insistence that every reasonably competent adult must eventually become a founder. A functioning city also requires managers, designers, consultants, writers, accountants, researchers, parents, volunteers, customers and people who occasionally wish to finish work without disrupting an industry.

What matters is that the programme increases the number of possible connections between newcomers and the wider city. A remote employee may initially arrive with a job based in California, New York or Texas, but may later hire locally, invest in a business, join a nonprofit board, purchase a home, start a family, establish a company or persuade somebody else to move. The immediate transaction is relocation; the intended return is accumulated participation.

This is also why duration matters more than the original offer. Tulsa Remote began in 2018, before the pandemic turned remote work from a growing employment practice into a global argument about offices, productivity, freedom, loneliness, city centres and the correct number of days per week on which adults should pretend to enjoy commuting.

Many programmes announced during the pandemic were temporary attempts to capture a suddenly mobile professional class. Tulsa Remote predates that moment and has continued well beyond it. Its endurance suggests that the initiative is not based solely on a passing remote-work frenzy or on the novelty of a cheque. The model has had time to develop alumni, networks, local partnerships, institutional knowledge and a community large enough to become part of the proposition itself.

The programme now benefits from a form of compounding. The first participants moved to join an experiment. Later participants can move into an existing network containing thousands of people, accumulated experience and a visible body of alumni who have chosen to remain. Every successful relocation potentially makes the next relocation less socially risky.

That is how an incentive begins to become infrastructure.

Community is not the decorative part

Economic-development plans are often divided into serious components and soft components. Serious components include capital, property, transport, tax, skills and employment. Community is placed near the end, generally beside a photograph of young people drinking coffee under decorative lighting.

For remote workers, however, community is not a lifestyle accessory. It is one of the principal determinants of whether relocation works.

A remote worker can bring employment to a new city without bringing colleagues, an office, a social network or any of the incidental human contact traditionally attached to work. Geographic freedom can therefore produce both opportunity and disconnection. A person may be able to work from anywhere and still discover that “anywhere” becomes lonely remarkably quickly.

Tulsa Remote treats social and professional integration as a core part of the economic proposition. Participants are connected with one another, but also with established residents, nonprofits, businesses and local institutions. The aim is not merely to create an enclave of recently arrived laptop owners, all congratulating one another on the price of their apartments. It is to create routes into the city beyond the programme itself.

The programme’s reported retention figures indicate that this approach has had some success. An 80 per cent two-year retention rate does not mean that everybody remains permanently, nor does it prove that every participant has found professional fulfilment somewhere between downtown Tulsa and the Arkansas River. It does, however, suggest that many participants continue living there after the payment has ceased to provide any reason to do so.

That is the test that cash-only programmes frequently avoid. They publish the number of applications, announce the successful recipients and circulate photographs of the first arrivals. Much less is said two, three or five years later, when the incentives have expired, the ribbon has been cut and the new residents have had sufficient time to discover whether the local ecosystem extends beyond a discounted property and an enthusiastic mayor.

Tulsa’s model is interesting precisely because it is designed around the period after the launch event.

Meanwhile, in Europe: here is your cheap house, and good luck

Europe has no shortage of territories attempting to attract new residents. Rural municipalities offer grants, discounted properties, tax relief, business incentives and houses advertised for symbolic prices. Some initiatives are serious, well-designed and connected to genuine local strategies. Others seem to assume that affordability is a complete answer to the question of why a person should reorganise an entire life.

The sales proposition often begins and ends with cheapness. The house is cheap. The land is cheap. The rent is cheap. The tax regime is advantageous. The municipality may contribute to renovation costs, provided the applicant satisfies 46 conditions, submits the correct historic cadastral document and has not used blue ink on page seven.

Then, once the new resident arrives: “auguri e figli maschi”.

The missing questions are usually the most important ones. What professional opportunities exist once the person is there? Who will introduce them to clients, employers, investors or collaborators? Is there a functioning community rather than a promotional idea of one? Can a partner find work? Are there schools, healthcare, transport, childcare and reliable digital infrastructure? Is housing merely inexpensive, or is it actually habitable? What happens after the grant is spent and the novelty of restoring a stone wall in a village with no pharmacy has worn off?

Cheapness may attract attention, particularly in a period of punishing housing costs across many European cities. But being inexpensive is not an economic strategy. Sometimes it is simply evidence that demand has already rendered its judgement.

Tulsa’s advantage is not that it has discovered a more generous incentive. Its advantage is that the incentive sits inside a proposition with several layers: a sizeable city, an existing labour market, a lower cost base than many major American metropolitan areas, professional networks, civic institutions, entrepreneurial support and a deliberately constructed community of newcomers.

The relevant comparison is therefore not between $10,000 in Tulsa and a €30,000 relocation grant somewhere in Europe. The relevant comparison is between what the recipient can plausibly build in either place over the following five or ten years.

One offer discounts the move. The other attempts to improve the trajectory.

The model is not beyond criticism

Tulsa Remote is selective by design. It attracts people who already possess qualifying remote employment and the economic security required to contemplate relocation. It is not a universal employment programme, an anti-poverty measure or a substitute for investment in residents who have lived in Tulsa all their lives.

The initiative also benefits from the involvement of a foundation with unusual financial resources and a long-term interest in the city. Many towns and regions cannot reproduce that institutional capacity merely by admiring the results and commissioning a logo.

There are also legitimate concerns about housing pressure, inequality and the distribution of economic benefits. Recruiting relatively well-paid workers can increase demand and reshape neighbourhoods in ways that do not benefit every existing resident. Aggregate growth is not the same as equitable growth, and the arrival of new professional talent does not automatically address longstanding racial, social or economic disparities.

This is particularly significant in Tulsa, a city whose economic history cannot be separated from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Greenwood, one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States. A contemporary innovation ecosystem does not erase that history, and the success of a relocation programme should also be judged by whether it expands opportunity for the people already living in the city.

The Upjohn research is encouraging because it considers benefits to existing residents rather than only the income of programme participants. It nevertheless remains essential to distinguish between an estimated net benefit for a local economy and an equal benefit for every household within it.

Tulsa has not solved urban inequality, remote work, regional development or capitalism. This may come as a disappointment to anybody expecting a relocation grant to do all four.

What it has done is construct a programme around a more credible understanding of how people choose places.

Places compete for people, whether they admit it or not

Cities have always competed for capital, companies, institutions, tourists and major events. They are now increasingly competing for people whose income is geographically portable and whose choice of residence is no longer determined entirely by the location of an employer.

This requires a change in the way places present themselves. A city is not merely selling property, weather, tax or cost of living. It is selling the possibility of a future: professional progress, social connection, personal identity, security, opportunity and the belief that moving there will expand rather than diminish one’s life.

Tulsa Remote translates that competition into a structured process. It creates awareness, invites applications, selects candidates, reduces relocation friction, supports arrival, facilitates integration and measures retention. In commercial language, it is a customer-acquisition and retention model applied to human capital. In civic language, it is a place attempting to take responsibility for what happens between attracting a resident and becoming their home.

There is a certain irony in the fact that a city many outsiders first encountered as the setting for a Sylvester Stallone crime drama may now offer one of the more serious case studies in contemporary talent attraction.

The cheque helped Tulsa become a headline. The infrastructure around it has allowed Tulsa Remote to become a programme. Its longevity, retention and connection to a broader economic strategy are what may eventually turn it into policy.

Other cities can copy the amount. They can copy the website, the application form, the photographs of smiling people in coworking spaces and perhaps even the slightly breathless vocabulary of community and opportunity.

The more difficult thing to copy is the substance that begins after the newcomer has unpacked.

Tulsa’s most compelling offer is not that it will help pay for the journey. It is that, more than seven years into the experiment, it is still working on giving people reasons not to make the journey back.

Two Dutch organisers built a “curated community” for nomads, reportedly filtered out Indonesians, blamed the algorithm and left for Singapore. Indonesia has now told them not to come back.

There are many ways to behave like an idiot abroad.

You can drive a scooter without a helmet. Climb something sacred for Instagram. Open a laptop in a café, order one coconut water and occupy the table until the staff change shifts.

Or, for the more ambitious expat, you can move to Bali, organise events on Indonesian soil, use Indonesian public spaces and then allegedly prevent Indonesians from joining.

That last option has proved surprisingly bad for business.

Two Dutch men behind Entourage Bali, a social and running community aimed at digital nomads, have been banned from re-entering Indonesia after authorities accused their organisation of discriminating against local residents and operating events without the necessary authorisation.

The men were officially identified only by their initials, JAS and HQV, aged 35 and 37. Indonesian and international media have reported that they are believed to be Entourage founders Joost Storms and Hidde van Vliet.

Their project marketed itself as a “curated social community” connecting travellers, expats and nomads through carefully selected experiences at some of Bali’s nicest locations.

Very curated, apparently.

The group became known for large early-morning runs, including a silent-disco event in Canggu in which participants jogged through the area wearing wireless headphones. Around 150 people reportedly joined one of the runs.

Then Indonesians started asking an awkward question:

Can we come too?

According to complaints shared online, the answer was frequently no.

One Indonesian woman, Annisa Rahmadani Maclean, said her application was delayed while her husband, who had a Western name and foreign telephone number, was accepted immediately. Other screenshots appeared to show applicants being questioned about whether they were Indonesian or Balinese before being rejected.

In one reported exchange, the club explained that its platform was for digital nomads and suggested that an automated system was responsible for the rejection.

Ah, yes. The algorithm.

The modern corporate equivalent of “the dog ate my homework”, only with a WhatsApp group and some light racial profiling.

Entourage later apologised and said that errors in its automated approval process had created a bias against some Indonesian numbers. It insisted that nationality did not define who qualified as a digital nomad and claimed Indonesians accounted for nearly 25 per cent of tickets sold for the silent-disco run. The organisation paused its activities and promised changes.

That defence may explain a technical failure. It does not explain why someone apparently designed a system capable of treating an Indonesian phone number as a reason for suspicion while operating a community in Indonesia.

Algorithms do not arrive from outer space.

Someone decides what they filter.

Someone defines the desirable user.

Someone looks at the resulting sea of foreign faces and decides the system is working perfectly well — right up until the screenshots go viral.

Indonesian immigration authorities were not amused.

Director General of Immigration Hendarsam Marantoko described the event as resembling “a state within a state” and said foreigners could not invent their own rules or establish exclusive structures inside Indonesian jurisdiction. Officials also alleged that the organisers had breached immigration or permit conditions by managing commercial events without proper authorisation.

By the time immigration officers moved against them, the two organisers had already left Bali for Singapore. They were subsequently placed on Indonesia’s entry-ban list.

The Daily Telegraph reported the case on 27 July, following coverage in Indonesian and Australian media.

And while the story is undeniably funny — two expats building an exclusive foreigners’ jogging club before having to run all the way to Singapore — it exposes something considerably uglier.

Welcome to Bali. Please remove the Balinese

Digital nomad culture likes to describe itself using words such as freedom, community, connection and authenticity.

These words usually appear beside photographs of laptops, infinity pools and suspiciously untouched smoothie bowls.

But in destinations overwhelmed by remote workers and lifestyle migrants, “community” can become a pleasant euphemism for segregation.

People relocate thousands of miles to experience another culture, then immediately construct a social environment in which they never have to encounter it.

They live in foreigner compounds, eat in foreigner restaurants, attend foreigner networking events, date other foreigners and join private chat groups devoted to finding the most “authentic” places before too many locals discover them.

The destination becomes a decorative background.

The local population provides the villas, food, roads, cleaners, drivers, temples, beaches and aesthetic atmosphere. But when it comes to entering the actual social circle, suddenly the community is “curated”.

This is not cultural exchange.

It is colonialism with better branding and worse trousers.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with expatriates wanting to meet other newcomers. People moving to a foreign country often need friendship, practical advice and professional networks.

The problem begins when a network for foreigners turns into a network against locals.

Especially when it occupies public spaces.

Especially when it monetises activities.

And especially when its foreign organisers appear to forget that Bali is not an international coworking resort with a conveniently underpaid indigenous service team.

It is part of Indonesia.

Indonesians are not guest stars there.

Digital nomadism does not cancel immigration law

The other lesson is considerably less philosophical.

A digital nomad visa, residence permit or investor permit is not diplomatic immunity.

Foreigners cannot assume that calling something a “community” transforms an organised commercial operation into a harmless gathering of friends. If events involve sponsors, paid tickets, promotion, staff, partnerships or repeated use of public areas, local licensing and employment rules may apply.

Indonesian authorities said one organiser held a temporary stay permit linked to work and the other an investor permit. They nevertheless concluded that the activities warranted immigration sanctions and further investigation.

This is an important distinction for the remote-work crowd.

Being able to perform your ordinary foreign job from a laptop does not automatically authorise you to launch a local business, organise events, sell services or manage commercial activities in the country where you happen to be staying.

The palm trees do not invalidate the law.

Neither does putting “nomad” in your Instagram biography.

Indonesia has recently increased scrutiny of foreigners suspected of working or conducting commercial activities under inappropriate visa conditions. The Entourage case therefore arrived in an environment where authorities were already less inclined to treat expat entrepreneurial improvisation as adorable.

The apology nobody should need to write

Entourage said it was sorry and had never intended to disrespect or discriminate against anyone.

Possibly true.

But intention is a remarkably low standard.

Most forms of privileged stupidity are not accompanied by a strategic plan entitled How to Offend the Population of Our Host Country. They emerge from people becoming so comfortable inside their own bubble that they stop noticing the people outside it.

That appears to be the larger problem here.

Not simply that Indonesian applicants were allegedly rejected.

But that a group could operate in Bali, fill its promotional material with Bali, build its commercial attraction around Bali and still apparently design its membership experience around keeping a certain kind of Bali resident at arm’s length.

The authorities’ response may look severe to Europeans accustomed to lengthy consultations, carefully worded warnings and perhaps a modest administrative fine in 2029.

Indonesia chose a more concise communications strategy:

Leave.

And do not come back.

It is difficult to misunderstand.

Run anywhere. Just remember where you are

The irony is almost too perfect.

Entourage Bali sold connection but reportedly practised exclusion.

It promoted international community while allegedly filtering out the nationality of the country hosting it.

It organised running events for foreigners and eventually saw its founders make the most consequential run of all: to the airport.

The case should not become an excuse to treat every digital nomad as an entitled neo-colonialist. Many live responsibly, employ local professionals fairly, learn the language, follow the rules and understand that being welcomed somewhere is a privilege rather than an acquisition.

But the Entourage affair is a useful warning for the rest.

You are allowed to move abroad.

You are allowed to build friendships.

You are allowed to create communities and, with the proper permits, businesses.

You are not allowed to behave as though the country is merely a picturesque operating system for your lifestyle.

And when you organise a running club in Indonesia, admitting Indonesians really should not qualify as an advanced diversity initiative.

It is the bare minimum.

Based on reporting by Lily Shanagher for The Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2026, with additional reporting from ABC News Australia, Antara, Detik Bali and the Indonesian immigration authorities.

The digital nomad fantasy usually goes something like this: laptop open, coconut nearby, sea in the background and absolutely no fluorescent office lighting.

The Wi-Fi is perfect. The clients are relaxed. Nobody asks why you joined the meeting wearing sunglasses.

Reality, unfortunately, has paperwork.

According to a recent article by Indrabati Lahiri for Euronews Business, worldwide Google searches for “digital nomad visas” increased by 1,135% in 2024. Clearly, a very large number of people have had the same revolutionary idea: leave home, take the laptop and call it a lifestyle.

For employees, this can already get complicated. For entrepreneurs, it can become a small multinational compliance experiment conducted from a café with one electrical socket.

Before you announce your “new chapter” on LinkedIn, here are nine things worth sorting out.

1. A tourist visa is not a business plan

Choosing the destination because the beach looks nice is understandable. Choosing it without checking whether you are legally allowed to work there is less charming.

Some countries offer specific digital nomad visas. Others may prohibit working while on a standard tourist visa, even when your customers and company are based elsewhere.

Check:

• whether the country has a visa suitable for remote workers or business owners;

• the minimum income requirement;

• how long you may remain;

• whether the visa can be renewed;

• whether it allows you to manage a company rather than simply work remotely.

The immigration officer is unlikely to be impressed by your personal brand.

2. Tax residency follows rules, not Instagram stories

You may leave your country. Your tax obligations do not necessarily leave with you.

Where you live, how long you stay, where your company is managed and where its economic activity takes place can all affect your personal and corporate tax position.

In the worst cases, you could face obligations in more than one jurisdiction. Double-taxation treaties may help, but they are not magical “I work online” exemptions.

Before relocating, speak to a qualified tax or legal adviser about:

• personal tax residency;

• corporate residence or permanent-establishment risks;

• double-taxation agreements;

• local registration and reporting requirements;

• social-security obligations.

This is the boring conversation that may prevent a much more expensive conversation later.

3. Your bank may not share your sense of adventure

Running a business internationally means dealing with different currencies, foreign transaction fees, exchange-rate movements and banking systems that occasionally become suspicious because you bought lunch in Lisbon and paid a supplier in Bangkok on the same afternoon.

Consider business accounts and payment services that support multiple currencies, reasonable conversion rates and low international fees.

More importantly, keep business and personal money separate.

Paying for a client subscription, an Airbnb and six cocktails from the same account does not make you a global entrepreneur. It makes your bookkeeping unnecessarily creative.

4. “The Wi-Fi looked good in the photos” is not due diligence

Beautiful accommodation listings often describe the internet as “fast”.

Fast enough for what? Sending a message? Uploading a 4GB file? Hosting a presentation for twelve people while somebody in the next room streams a film?

Before booking a destination or long-term accommodation, check:

• actual broadband speeds;

• mobile-data coverage;

• backup connectivity;

• access to coworking spaces;

• electricity reliability;

• whether the workspace is usable for several hours a day.

A hammock is excellent for a photograph. It is less impressive after four hours of spreadsheets.

5. Travel insurance may not cover your actual life

A standard holiday insurance policy may cover a lost suitcase. It may not cover long-term remote work, expensive professional equipment, business liability or interruption to your operations.

Check whether you need separate:

• health insurance;

• extended travel cover;

• equipment insurance;

• professional or business insurance;

• business interruption cover.

Assuming you are insured is a surprisingly popular method of discovering that you are not.

Read the policy. Yes, the actual policy.

6. Time zones are fun until every meeting happens at midnight

Moving eight or ten hours away from your customers sounds manageable when viewed as a line on a map.

It feels different when your working day begins at 5am or ends at 1am.

Consider when your clients, employees, suppliers and partners are available. Then calculate what your real working week would look like.

Could your business operate asynchronously? Can somebody else make decisions while you are asleep? Will customers accept slower responses? Are you willing to arrange your entire life around another continent’s office hours?

Sunset meetings look glamorous for approximately three days.

7. Public Wi-Fi is not your IT department

Digital nomads frequently work from cafés, hotels, airports and coworking spaces. These are convenient places to drink coffee and less convenient places to handle sensitive customer information.

Basic protections should include:

• a reputable VPN;

• multi-factor authentication;

• encrypted devices;

• automatic security updates;

• secure backups;

• password-management software;

• limits on what you access through unsecured networks.

Also prepare for the loss or theft of your laptop and phone.

Your cybersecurity strategy cannot simply be “I usually sit where I can see my bag.”

8. Keep an emergency fund that belongs to you, not the company

Visa delays, cancelled accommodation, medical emergencies and unexpected flights can become expensive very quickly.

Maintain a personal financial buffer so that a travel problem does not force you to raid company cash.

The precise amount will depend on your destination, responsibilities and business model, but it should be enough to cover a realistic disruption rather than an optimistic weekend.

Working from anywhere is easier when one unexpected invoice does not threaten payroll.

9. The business still needs to work when the novelty wears off

A different country may give you inspiration, energy and better weather.

It will not automatically give you stable revenue.

Before leaving, ask what happens if:

• a major client disappears;

• customer demand falls;

• payment cycles become longer;

• you cannot work for several weeks;

• your new location makes sales or support more difficult;

• key decisions still depend entirely on you.

Document essential processes. Create backups. Delegate access and authority. Review contracts. Build more than one source of revenue where possible.

Business continuity is not especially sexy, but neither is flying home because the company stopped functioning without you.

The beach is optional. The planning is not.

Becoming a digital nomad can be a legitimate way to build a more flexible life. It can provide access to new markets, communities and experiences.

But moving your laptop abroad does not make the legal, financial and operational structure of your company disappear.

It simply changes the view behind it.

So yes, book the flight. Find the sunny apartment. Post the obligatory photograph of your laptop beside the sea.

Just sort out the visa, taxes, money, insurance, cybersecurity, time zones and survival of the actual business first.

Otherwise, you are not running a company from paradise.

You are taking a complicated problem on holiday.

Based on and developed from “9 things European entrepreneurs should know before becoming digital nomads”, by Indrabati Lahiri, Euronews Business, 23 July 2026.

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