👉 The suitcase carries a swimsuit and a laptop in equal measure.
📘 What are Workations?
Workations are a travel style in which a guest combines remote work with leisure, staying at a holiday destination for an extended period while continuing to carry out their job remotely. The term blends “work” and “vacation”.
Key features:
- The guest keeps up their usual working hours (or part of them) from the destination, so they need proper working conditions: reliable wifi, a desk space, good lighting and, often, coworking areas.
- They differ from bleisure in that they don’t start from a one-off business trip (a meeting or event), but from a stay planned specifically to work remotely from elsewhere for days or weeks.
- They typically involve longer stays than a traditional holiday booking, since the guest isn’t limited by annual leave but by however long they choose to stay while still working.
- They have grown alongside remote working and workplace flexibility, affecting both individual profiles (digital nomads, remote professionals) and whole teams travelling together (company offsites).
- They require the hotel to adapt part of its offer: rooms with an ergonomic desk, coworking areas, meeting rooms, printing services or guaranteed high-speed connectivity.
For Revenue Management, workations represent a segment with a different stay logic to the conventional holiday guest: longer stays, greater date flexibility, and different price sensitivity, since they compete with the remote worker’s own cost of living back home.
✅ Why do Workations matter?
- They generate longer stays than the average holiday booking, improving metrics such as cumulative ADR per booking and reducing room turnover.
- They help smooth out seasonality, since the workation guest isn’t tied to official holiday periods and can book during shoulder or low season.
- They open up additional revenue through value-added services (coworking, meeting rooms, long-stay rates, half-board plans adapted to a working schedule).
- They require a review of the product offer (connectivity, workspaces) that, well managed, can differentiate the hotel from competitors.
- They attract a guest profile with higher repeat and loyalty potential, as they may choose the same destination or brand again for future remote-work stays.
- They require adjusting pricing and segmentation, distinguishing between short pure-leisure stays and longer workation stays, which are usually negotiated under different rates and conditions.
💡 Practical example
A beach hotel in shoulder season notices a rise in requests for two- and three-week stays from professionals wanting to work remotely from the destination. The Revenue Manager, together with Operations, sets up several rooms with a desk and ergonomic chair, improves wifi speed across the hotel, and creates a “Workations” rate with a long-stay discount and access to a lobby coworking space.
The result: the hotel captures demand on shoulder-season dates that previously generated low occupancy, improves cumulative ADR per booking thanks to the length of stay, and starts receiving repeat bookings from the same guests at different times of the year.
🔄 Disambiguation
- Workations vs Bleisure: Bleisure starts from a one-off business trip (a meeting, a conference) to which leisure days are added; workations have no one-off business purpose — they’re stays planned specifically to work remotely from a holiday destination.
- Workations vs Staycation: A staycation is defined by geographic proximity to home; workations can happen in any destination, near or far, and are defined by combining remote work and leisure, not by distance.
- Workations vs Long stay: A long stay is a general category of extended bookings, which can occur for many different reasons (relocation, home renovations, medical treatment); workations are a specific type of long stay driven by the ability to work remotely.
- Workations vs Solocation: A solocation is defined by travelling without company; workations are defined by combining work and leisure, regardless of whether the guest travels alone, as a couple, or with family.
In summary: workations turn remote work into a demand driver for the hotel sector, generating longer, less seasonal stays and pushing hotels to adapt their product and pricing to capture a guest who works while staying.
