It’s pretty typical to have to take paid time off in order to travel with the family. However, in an increasingly connected world, it has now become more than possible to combine family travel with remote work in order to get the best of both worlds. Read on for some tips and strategies on how to balance remote work with family travel!
There are typically three things that need to fall into place to balance work with travel: your destination, your work schedule, and your kids’ school schedules. It’s definitely easier if you homeschool your kids, but if not, you may be confined to travel on holidays and summer breaks.
Your Destination
When considering where to travel as a family while working, the first thing you’ll probably want to consider is how far you want to go. This usually determines how long you end up traveling, because the further you go, the more it makes sense to stay longer. This also means that a longer trip would necessitate working because you might not be able to take multiple weeks of time off to truly enjoy a distant destination. For us, we typically plan for month+ long trips in the summers. In 2021, we spent a month in Hawaii, exploring the beautiful islands of Maui and the Big Island while still working remotely. In 2022, we spent over a month traveling to Colombia, St Kitts, and the US in the summer and balanced working during this time as well.
When researching a remote work-friendly destination, your accommodation is typically the most important decision you’ll have to make. You’ll have to find a place where you’ll have good Internet connectivity and a workspace that you can leverage.
Hotel vs. Airbnb
There are pros and cons to staying both at a hotel and Airbnb when traveling and working. A hotel is convenient because you generally have pretty consistent WiFi, it’s easy to find food, and there may be more activities for the family to enjoy while you work. There may even be a kids club where you can drop off the kids if both parents need to manage a working schedule. However, the cons are that it may be more expensive (compared to a short term rental), and you may not have a dedicated workspace. You can call ahead to see if a hotel has conference rooms (which may cost extra), or if you’re staying in a central area, if there’s co-working spaces nearby where you can rent out a workspace.
A short-term rental like an Airbnb basically flips the pros and cons of a hotel. The biggest benefits are that they tend to be more cost effective, and give you the opportunity to have more space, potentially even a dedicated workspace. However, you miss out on having the amenities that hotels provide (like recreation, meals and kids clubs) so you’d have to do more planning to make sure the family finds activities while you work.
Your Work Schedule
There’s a few things to consider when making a plan for balancing family travel with work. The first is all about setting your schedule. This will depend heavily on the type of work that you have. Do you have meetings that you can’t miss? Or is it mostly asynchronous work? If you have meetings to attend, make sure you consider that when choosing a location. If you’re on a different time zone, then your schedule will have to match that of the time zone for your work. In Hawaii, I had to structure my schedule to start at 4AM local time because of the meetings I had to attend on Eastern Time. The benefit of that was that although I started early, I also ended early, which allowed me to spend the afternoon exploring with the family.
Strategic Time Off
Even though the point of balancing family travel with work is to be able to benefit from exploring while still taking care of business, sometimes there’s going to be conflicts that you’ll have to deal with. For example, there might be certain excursions at a destination that make the most sense to do during the weekday. The reality is that many destinations do end up being more busy on the weekends. So, if you can afford to take time off so you can truly enjoy an experience with less crowds, then try to plan ahead for that.
Your Kids’ School Schedule
The next consideration is all about trying to plan around your kids’ school. This assumes that you’re not homeschooling or in a private school that allows for flexible attendance. If your school district has strict attendance policies, then you may be stuck with only traveling on breaks and holidays. That’s still OK! That’s something that we’ve done the past 2 years and is still a very enjoyable experience. However, if there is an opportunity to work with your school to establish flexibility or work you can take on the road, you should definitely take advantage of it. That would allow you to travel during low seasons where you can have a better travel experience without as many crowds as during peak seasons. In certain cases, we’ve worked with our kids’ teachers to make sure we understand what is being covered while we’re gone. That way we can supplement some learning activities while traveling so when they come back they’re not behind on schoolwork.
Conclusion
Let me be clear, I’m not advocating that you should bypass your paid time off and stop taking family vacations. Unplugging from work on a family vacation is extremely beneficial for resting, recharging and getting quality time with the family. However, if you are in a position where you can add MORE positive experiences by balancing work with travel, then by all means go for it! Honestly, it’s not going to be easy and may require time and patience to adjust to, but I can truly say it’s led to some really enjoyable moments for our whole family. If you have any questions on specific situations that you may be planning for, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! You can find us on Instagram @thejetsettingfamily.
