Attraction policies for digital nomads: some emerging issues

The rise of the digital labour market in recent years has stimulated the growth of the digital nomad community. To cater to this specific work-leisure segment, many co-living spaces are actively marketing their products to be the perfect accommodation solution to help overcome the isolation that urbanity and digital nomadism bring along. However, little research has been done to explore these new solutions of living circumstances and whether it enhances digital nomads’ lifestyle. This study is particularly interested in exploring the role of co-living spaces in digital nomads’ overall well-being. Through a grounded theory approach, 12 interviews with digital nomads living in co-living spaces are conducted and generated new insights. In doing so, the paper elaborates on the specific elements of co-living spaces that influence digital nomads’ experiences and subsequently explains how the elements of digital nomads’ overall well-being links to the neo-tribe theory. In the end, based on the neo-tribe characteristics exhibited by digital nomads, practitioners are given recommendations on how to improve the design and developments of co-living spaces to facilitate digital nomads’ well-being.

Rapid development in technology sparked the emergence of digital nomadism. There are certain facilities to support digital nomads' lifestyle of remote working while traveling, one of which is coworking space. BWork Bali Coworking Space (BWork) is a coworking space located in Canggu, Bali where the area is considered as one of the leading areas for digital nomads around the world. BWork intended to maintain its relationship with digital nomads due to the inconstant trends of digital nomads as its users, as well as to expand its market reach. Therefore, the barriers to marketing activity and marketing communication implementations were analyzed. This research was conducted using qualitative methods and data collection through interviews, documentation, and observation. The study implied that BWork had difficulty reaching digital nomads originating from Asian countries due to language barriers and cultural differences. Also, different views on coworking style among digital nomads could affect their continuity as users and the quality of the internet connection could determine sales, which unstable connection leads to lower sales. The results of the study had shown that BWork prioritized various digital platforms, especially Instagram, to communicate with its members, although not all platforms were managed thoroughly. However, BWork could manage good relationships with digital nomads through events categorized based on digital nomads' needs. Meanwhile, efforts to reach Asian digital nomads have yet to show a significant impact. It is suggested for coworking spaces that target digital nomads as their users should be able to optimize various digital platforms to reach a wider range of digital nomads who are new to the nomadism lifestyle, have better crowd management and noise control, also form a relationship with digital nomad communities from various countries and actively promote cultures.

Digital nomadism gradually expanded during the 2010s. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work (a prerequisite to digital nomadism), suddenly became mainstream. In this new context the term digital nomadism is increasingly used in ways that are broader or different to its original conception. This paper reviews scientific literature and draws on the author’s ethnographic fieldwork to create an updated classification of contemporary digital nomadism that acknowledges the broad spectrum of individuals, groups, communities, identities, and imaginaries labelled with the term digital nomad. The paper updates the definition of digital nomadism and provides a new taxonomy which subdivides the digital nomad model into five distinct types: freelance digital nomads; digital nomad business owners; salaried digital nomads; experimental digital nomads and armchair digital nomads. It also proposes that six key variable themes should be applied to these classifications. These are: autonomy over mobility; homebase practices; domestic vs. transnational travel; legal legitimacy; work-life balance and coworking space usage. The taxonomy and the variable themes are proposed as a roadmap for future research and as a tool so researchers and policymakers can more accurately evaluate real-world examples of digital nomad context, motivation, practice, and impact.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is quantify the fast growing and dynamic population of workers known as digital nomads, workers who live a location agnostic, technology enabled lifestyle, traveling while living and working away from their home for extended periods of time. Since the pandemic, companies that embrace remote work policies are winning accolades. But along with the work-from-home crowd, there is another distinct group of employees that companies need to address: digital nomads – a rising new class of traditional job holders that have taken to the road. As human resources (HR) departments rewrite their policies for the remote workforce, it is critical that you put in place a digital nomad policy. Having a digital nomad policy will not only allow your company to attract and retain top talent but will also protect you from regulatory and legal risks.Design/methodology/approachThe Digital Nomad data cited in this paper comes from the 2021 MBO Partners State of Independence in America study, which was fielded in July of 2021. This is the 11th consecutive year this study has been conducted. For the 2021 study, Emergent Research and Rockbridge Associates surveyed 6,240 residents of the USA (aged 18 and older). The survey results were weighted to reflect the demographics of the USA.FindingsToday, the USA alone boasts 15.5 million digital nomads – a massive 112% increase from 2019 and 42% increase from 2020. With workers untethered from the office, the pandemic drove an increase in digital nomadism; however, the trend is here to stay. Corporations and HR teams need to take note and develop forward-thinking policies that will attract and retain talent.Originality/valueOver the past three years, MBO Partners, in partnership with Emergent Research, have collaborated on an extensive digital nomad study that has attracted the interest of Harvard Business Review. The company’s larger State of Independence report is also the longest-running longitudinal study on the independent workforce. Despite the large and growing number of digital nomads, few organizations have formal policies and programs for them. MBO is the first to develop policies and programs to help HR teams embrace this new era of talent who want the freedom to roam.

This dissertation applies an urban political-economy framework to look at the growing mobile and laboring population of digital nomads who are attempting to pursue their futures and access the city amidst an increasingly global and uneven geographic distribution of jobs located in inaccessible cities, a situation I refer to as the new urban crisis. I approach Digital Nomads as a new in-formation unit of production introduced by changes in the nature of work as well as by corresponding changes in the urban social structures of social reproduction brought about by the transition to post-industrialism and the flexible regime of capital accumulation. Digital Nomads are a heterogenous population, a field of class fragments brought together by their shared and plural experiences of the new urban crisis. It is in the way that these diverse actors respond to this crisis that they begin to form themselves as a coherent figure and subject, or rather a number of classes-in-formation obscured under the moniker of the Digital Nomad. Mobility is a key tool this population utilizes in response to this crisis, connecting to cities in new ways through practices such as co-living and remote work. Digital Nomads approach these practices from different positions, coming across one another in shared spaces in the cities they invest their mobility in while learning from one another the different ends these practices can be put to. These collisions shape and direct their future mobility and its underlying logics, acting as the sites where digital nomads and their successors are being made. As the outcomes of this mobility will impact cities and systems of global production for decades to come, it is vital to understand the processes by which this mobility is directed, to understand how the lifeworld of labor and the digital nomad makes mobility to certain places over others possible, posing the question: When you can live anywhere, where do you choose to live? This dissertation sets out to unpack the subjective processes by which digital nomads invest their mobility, a practice I will refer to as Urban Prospecting. Urban Prospecting is both the objective collection of these movements and the open-ended sets of subjective logics guiding these pursuits. Urban Prospecting logics are used to evaluate places as potential sites for future investments of mobility, these evaluations weighing how each place makes certain life outcomes related to the self and employment possible. In order to get at both the logics and outcomes of urban prospecting, I utilized a mixed methods approach which included network analysis and multi-sited ethnography to unpack how digital nomads interpret their position within the global urban landscape and how these interpretations guide where they invested their mobility. Building a social network model of digital nomad mobility logged on the social networking platform Nomadlist between more than 700 cities around the globe, my research demonstrated that digital nomads engage in two broad circuits of mobility: (1) mobility to the global city, and (2) mobility away from the global city to new offbeat and off-the-map locations. I then conducted multi-sited ethnography at the PodShare co-living space in the Global City of Los Angeles and the Ghoomakad co-living space in the Offbeat city of Dharamsala, India in order to look at the types of digital nomads and urban prospecting logics underlying each circuit of mobility. In each city, I elaborated a place-based typology of the type of digital nomads I met based on how they balanced the terms of urban prospecting that guided them to each location. In the former case, I looked at how and why this population is still attaching itself to global cities in crisis and their attendant labor and social reproductive markets. In the latter case, I investigated the emergence of new work destinations that have been enabled by the introduction of remote work that allows digital nomads to decouple from global cities and head to offbeat locales and remote getaways in Southeast Asia and the Global South that offer tourist infrastructures, nice weather and low costs of living. I end by considering the implications this labor mobility poses for the future of work, urbanization and capital accumulation in general.--Author's abstract

This article features in detail the understanding and definitions of e-residency and digital nomadism and how these affect the tax status of these people over time. With the help of countries like Croatia, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, and Estonia, it investigates into the legal and theoretical sides related to how a person not being a resident can obtain, hold, and give up e-residency and digital nomadism.In 2014, Estonia was the first country to introduce the concept of e-residency. This is the type of legal status that permits the individual to use a country’s software infrastructure without becoming a tax subject within that country. Digital nomadism, such as performed by high-skilled workers who can move their job to any place with an internet connection and travel visa often offered via special digital nomad visas, is related to the same phenomenon. Still, notwithstanding the peculiarities of these reforms promotion and the legal effectiveness of e-residence and digital nomadism, their taxation residency is still stuck to the conventional rules of taxation residency of e-residents and digital nomad which resident taxes are usually influenced by factors like the time spent in a country or where income is generated among other metrics unless distinctively specified under domestic law or international tax agreements.The research focuses on how e-residency and digital nomad visas, while being valid instruments of economic progress, do not change a person’s tax status in his country of actual residence except where the local law provides for such provisions. In this case, an individual who has e-residency in Estonia or has a digital nomad visa in Croatia would, in most cases, be treated as a resident of the country where this person is located and be subject to relevant taxes despite avalable tax reliefs guaranteed by countries grantingthis digital nomad visas.Building upon the experiences of these foreign jurisdictions, the article provides suggestions on how the terms digital nomad and e-resident can be embedded into the legislation of Ukraine. The establishment of these regimes is seen to be vital in the digital economy reconstruction of Ukraine after the war as they would bring in foreign skills, money and talent. Suggestions include the establishment and regulation of the tax status of e-residents and digital nomads so that the principles of best practices are observed to prevent the occurrence of dual taxation and encourage external investors.In the same viewpoint, the article underlines the significance of these mechanisms for global labor migration flows and considers the issues of labor migration in a global economy more widely. The legal issues involving e-residency, digital nomadism and tax residency bring to the fore the need for new tax.

Digital nomadism allows individuals to travel worldwide while using various forms of information technology (IT) to work digitally. Places like Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Canggu, Bali/Indonesia, have gained popularity among digital nomads in the past decade. In contributing to the economies of local communities, these nomads, with their unique characteristics, are an interesting, new visitor type. Governments worldwide are starting to recognise the potential of digital nomadism to improve local visitor economies. However, the impacts of digital nomadism on local communities, their culture and economies, are not without challenges and require further understanding. Almost all existing studies on digital nomadism focus on the nomads themselves, while, in this study, we take the perspective of the locals visited by digital nomads. Using the case study of Chiang Mai, the “digital nomad capital”, we answer the following research questions: What are the impacts of digital nomadism on local communities? How do digital nomads compare to other visitor types within the visitor economy of a local community? Our findings reveal diverse socio‐cultural, economic and technological impacts and how locals in Chiang Mai evaluate digital nomads differently compared to other types of visitors. This research, grounded in an in‐depth case study, contributes to a better understanding of digital nomadism by offering new knowledge about its ambivalent impacts on local communities. We also discuss contributions to the wider literature and implications for policy.

Decoding digital nomad destination decisions through user-generated content

ABSTRACTIndividuals in the creative sector often pursue the idea of the location-independent style of living and working (Müller, A. 2016. The digital nomad: Buzzword or research category? Transnational Social Review, 6(3), 344–348). Digital nomads represent a modern “knowmad” society (Moravec, J. W. 2013. Knowmad society: The “new” work and education. On the Horizon, 21(2), 79–83), whose boundaries between leisure, travel, and work appear blurred (Reichenberger, I. 2018. Digital nomads–a quest for holistic freedom in work and leisure. Annals of Leisure Research, 21(3), 364–380). This new type of fluid workforce tends to merge itself with the selected geographic area or environment for a brief period of time, and by that utilizing its logistic and digital infrastructure to maintain an individualized lifestyle (Richards, G. 2015. The new global nomads: Youth travel in a globalizing world. Tourism Recreation Research, 40(3), 340–352). Digital nomadism has brought upon a new form of creative tourism (Putra, G. B., & Agirachman, F. A. 2016. Urban coworking space: Creative tourism in digital nomads perspective. In Proceedings of Arte-Polis 6 International Conference (pp. 169–178)) that emancipates the involvement of individuals in the creative life of the destination and interaction with local communities by exchanging skill sets and ideas in a synergetic way (Richards, G., & Marques, L. 2012. Exploring creative tourism: Editors Iintroduction. Journal of Tourism Consumption and Practice Volume, 4(2), 1–11) by frequently using local coworking spaces. However, the motivational factors behind the usage of local coworking spaces remain unclear, as do the benefits offered by these flexible office environments. This paper thus investigates the popularization of digital nomadism and the influence of the digital nomad lifestyle on the work-leisure balance that appears to be affected by the use of coworking spaces.

PurposeThis paper aims to develop a vision for the future identifying how digital nomadism affects the labor markets in the tourism industry.Design/methodology/approachThe qualitative research method was used. The research data were collected using a semistructured interview form developed by the researcher. The sample consists of twenty people working in the tourism industry as tour guides, travel agency owners, accommodation sector employees and professional managers. The content analysis method was used to analyze the data.FindingsIt was found that employees in the tourism industry are familiar with digital nomadism, interact with employees working as digital nomads and may prefer the digital nomad way of working, while employees in the accommodation sector cannot work as digital nomads due to the nature of their work. It is shown that digital nomadism can be applied to tour guides and travel agency owners.Research limitations/implicationsThe data was collected from employees of the accommodation sector, travel agencies, tour guides and employees of the Turkish tourism labor market. It is recommended that the tourism labor markets adapt to the digitalized world and adjust their working models in this context.Originality/valueThis is one of the first studies on the impact of digital nomadism on the tourism labor markets.

PurposeThis study draws on optimum stimulation theory and aims to examine the food variety-seeking behavior and its effect on local food attitudes and local restaurant patronage of digital nomads.Design/methodology/approachA moderated mediation model is used, using survey data from a multicultural sample of 249 digital nomads across three popular digital nomad hubs: Bali, Thailand and Mexico.FindingsThe study finds that digital nomads with stronger food variety-seeking tendencies are more inclined visit local restaurants through mediating role of local food attitudes. This mediating effect is moderated by nomadic experience and patronage of restaurants that offer popular international cuisines, with inexperienced nomads and those more reliant on international food options showing a greater likelihood of embracing local food and visiting local restaurants.Research limitations/implicationsThis study extends food variety-seeking behavior literature and optimum stimulation theory by examining how digital nomads navigate food consumption in travel contexts. It highlights the heterogeneity in food variety seeking’s impact on local food attitudes and restaurant patronage, showing that nomadic experience and reliance on international food options shape these relationships.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the limited research on digital nomads’ food consumption behaviors and offers novel insights into how food variety-seeking tendencies shape their dining choices. It also provides practical guidance for local food businesses aiming to engage the fast-growing digital nomad market.

The trend of digital nomadism has increased for several years, but limited studies examined digital nomadism from a work ethic view. This study explores the possibility of the Malays being digital nomads using Weber’s Work Ethic and Cultural Adaptationist approach. This study used a qualitative approach with a library research design. A qualitative study was conducted by scrutinizing literature related to digital nomads and Malays’ work ethic. Two primary keywords for obtaining data were “Digital Nomads” and “Malay Work Ethic”. After searching for these keywords, 127 articles, books, and reports were received and sorted again according to research purposes. The selected sources were subjected to thematic analysis to identify patterns, concepts, relations, and meanings gathered from the data. The results show that the Malays will potentially join the digital nomadism trend in the future, but they will preserve Islamic values as their work ethic principles. Digital nomads in the Malay region should adapt to local values to be accepted in local communities. This study contributes to the Malay World study in response to the globalization of the workplace.

Purpose – Over the last two decades, people have significantly changed how they work and spend their leisure time. Taking advantage of remote work and lockdowns, many have taken up a digital nomad lifestyle. There are minimal studies on digital nomads in tourism destinations in developed countries, therefore the main objective of this study was to explore digital nomads as a traveller, their needs, and lifestyles in the relatively large city of Split in Croatia. Methodology – The eight online in-depth interviews were conducted in Split in the spring of 2022 on a population of digital nomads residing there during 2021 and/or 2022. Findings – This study identifies significant benefits of being a digital nomad in Split. However, the results also reveal a complex picture of the experiences and challenges of digital nomads affected by the seasonality of tourism, which manifests itself in a sharp increase in the cost of living (especially accommodation costs), disruption of their lives by crowds and noise, or services geared towards mass tourism. Furthermore, although local service providers appreciated the digital nomads in the off-season, they tried to maximise their income by switching to short-term accommodation rentals once tourist demand picked up, forcing them to move out and eventually return after the season. Contribution – This research identifies the digital nomad profile in popular tourist destinations in Europe. It provides recommendations that could help policymakers in any tourism-developed destination to implement policies for attracting more digital nomads to their cities which could positively impact their local economies.

The article proposes to consider the phenomenon of digital nomadism from the perspective of an intellectual and labor resource necessary for the implementation of recovery projects in the Ukrainian industry of regions already today. The aim of the article is to substantiate the impact of the modern motivation of global "digital nomads" on the formation of a new way of engaging them in new private and public projects for the post-war recovery of Ukraine's industry. The first half of the article provides an analytical overview of the motivational portrait of a digital nomad as a driving force for building a mechanism for engaging them in joint recovery projects, reveals the peculiarities of leadership and communications within the digital nomad system as a basis for building interaction between the state and digital nomad business owners. The second half of the article directly offers the author's view on building an algorithm for working with digital nomad business owners, developing a mechanism for engaging them in joint projects for the recovery of regional industries, and building a further systematic work for the sustainable development of Ukrainian regions. The basis for the successful implementation of the mechanism for attracting digital nomads should be taking into account the motivational component and the peculiarities of the system as the basis for building joint interaction processes. It is extremely important to adhere to the principles of rationality and mutual respect, avoid manifestations of authoritarianism and declarativeness in relationships, and reasonable limits of creativity.

The rise of the digital nomad has prompted heated debates, particularly given its rising relevance and projected growth. While a considerable body of academic research has delved into various aspects of this phenomenon, local authorities’ understanding and expectations regarding digital nomads remain understudied. This article aims to fill this research gap by drawing on ethnographic research, mainly consisting of eight open-ended interviews with local stakeholders and participant observation in digital nomad gatherings. The findings uncover the perceptions of Zadar’s policymakers about digital nomads as individuals who can financially contribute through spending, extend the tourist season by flocking in during the off-season, and disseminate knowledge. Among other relevant contributions, this paper suggests that digital nomads might rather be thought of as “short-term locals” instead of “long-term tourists” regarding their consumption patterns; argues that tourism stakeholders conceive digital nomads as off-season tourist boosters but not a main tourist target group; and hints at the fact that digital nomad knowledge transfer is unlikely to occur without the needed platforms. In doing so, this article constitutes a timely contribution to the academic literature since it interrogates the approach of local authorities to digital nomadism and unveils its specificities in Dalmatia, Croatia and Southeast Europe.