How tropical islands in Indonesia and Thailand are the new working from home

Business-leisure travellers are a subset of digital nomads, living and working abroad for longer than a typical holiday without taking up permanent residence

In April 2021, Indonesia floated the idea of a special 5-year visa exempting remote workers from paying local taxes if they do not earn an income domestically

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Business-leisure travellers are a subset of digital nomads, living and working abroad for longer than a typical holiday without taking up permanent residence in tropical locales like Thailand and Indonesia Photo: Shutterstock

Bloomberg

Published: 12:51pm, 30 Jun 2022Updated: 4:04pm, 30 Jun 2022

In the new world of work, there’s a new type of employee: The business-leisure traveller.

It’s the latest attempt to find a happy medium between working arrangements like Airbnb Inc.’s – where staff can work anywhere, anytime – and those at companies like Tesla Inc., whose chief executive officer Elon Musk tweeted that unless employees turn up in the office, “we will assume you have resigned.”

Business-leisure travellers are a subset of digital nomads, living and working abroad for longer than a typical holiday without taking up permanent residence. They usually spend weeks or months overseas before returning home, while other nomads may spend years on the road.

David Abraham realised there was a market for this type of ultra-remote working while at his laptop in a Tokyo Starbucks. When he noticed the customers around him were working too, he asked himself “why couldn’t they be in an amazing place like Bali?” Abraham now runs Outpost, a company that provides temporary living-working spaces in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Employees’ growing enthusiasm for business-leisure travel is slowly being met with policy momentum. Governments are trying to work out visa and tax regulations while businesses fret about compliance and corporate culture.