As with every other sector of travel, the youth and student travel market has taken a hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although the segment - responsible for 23% of international arrivals - was predicted by WYSE Travel Confederation to represent 370 million travelers accounting for more than $400 billion in spending in 2020, it has experienced a 60% drop in business in Q1 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.
Included in the youth and student travel market are companies that cater to digital nomads, which are travelers that live and work in a destination among likeminded peers.
Although the coronavirus has impacted these businesses much like any other travel brand, the digital nomad space is unique in that many of its participants are still eager to travel and connect – both onsite and virtually.
It’s also a segment rife with opportunity in a post-coronavirus world: As consumers grow more comfortable with the idea of working remotely, they’re learning they could do so quite literally anywhere around the globe once travel resumes.
Riding it out
For co-living and co-working network Outsite, which hosts its more than 1,000 members in 29 spaces across the world, the company had a number of its members already in destinations when the coronavirus outbreak occurred.
Although it was forced to close a few locations, particularly in Europe, due to government regulations, Outsite founder and CEO Emmanuel Guisset says it ultimately made the decision to keep its spaces open, despite stay-at-home orders and social distancing requests.
He explains that many of Outsite’s members aren’t just travelers - they’re also residents, living in one location for months at a time - and closing down a space would be effectively taking people out of their homes.
“We thought about shutting down everything - that was definitely a scenario - but we’re serving a community. They didn’t want that. They actually wanted to stay. And legally, we have no right to evict someone.”
A lot of our clients are not very concerned. They’re happy with the risk.
Emmanuel Guisset - Outsite
As a response to the outbreak, Outsite has implemented advanced cleaning procedures at its spaces, but when it comes to social distancing: “That’s a question mark,” Guisset says.
He says Outsite got rid of shared rooms and banned all events from its properties, and activity is monitored via WhatsApp groups where members can share concerns.
But ultimately, it’s up to members to act responsibly. “A lot of our clients, to be honest, are not very concerned. They’re happy with the risk,” he says.
“There’s not much we can do. We wish we could test everybody [but can’t]. … We just bet on common sense.”
However, some guests on trips are extending their stays, and the company is also seeing a rise in demand for bookings in remote locations such as Hawaii and Santa Cruz, California, where the company was founded in 2015.
“We took a hit, but we’re lucky to have good investors willing to support us,” Guisset says, adding that Outsite is not opening new locations during the pandemic and has stopped all marketing.
He says some staff was furloughed, while other team members had their salaries reduced. “For us, this is very tough. But the hardest has passed.
“We’re looking forward to the future and think it’s going to be better for the world, better for the travel industry.”
Pivot to virtual
Meanwhile, WiFi Tribe, which organizes monthly co-living and co-working retreats, chose to cancel all of its chapters for the duration of the pandemic.
“[Because of the coronavirus] I'm going to stop all operations from a business perspective, obviously,” co-founder and CEO Diego Bejarano Gerke says.
“There is a date when things are going to pick up again ... but we can't predict when the normal version of travel starts happening again.”
Bejarano Gerke says that ordinarily, WiFi Tribe, which launched in 2016, averages about one person joining its community per day, but during the pandemic, it's been getting roughly three per month.
So without new business, he says the company has turned itself into a “startup incubator” of sorts working to bring its in-person chapter experience online.
The online chapters, Bejarano Gerke says, are ways for the WiFi Tribe community to come together for experiences such as panel discussions, "mastermind" brainstorms, skill-share sessions and social functions.
"The gist of it is a combination of growth, social time and accountability," Bejarano Gerke says. "A lot of that stuff we're currently missing because life's been thrown upside down."
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The new format has “worked out surprisingly well,” he says. "I would say the first iteration only worked because people were just supporting us ... but then those people realized, 'Oh, this is really cool,' and came back for another round."
Bejarano Gerke says each online chapter runs for two weeks at a price point of $150, although a pay-what-you-can model is available to struggling community members.
He says the WiFi Tribe team, which has remained intact with reduced hours, is currently exploring what its model might look like when travel starts to resume, for example establishing hubs for people in specific locations that have eased restrictions.
"[The question is] when do people want to travel again and feel comfortable traveling again. ... Also, should you travel? And that's a moral question. We don't know what this is going to look like in three months, five months, so for some companies it's going to be more of a question of whether we should be doing certain activities or not."
Remote possibilities
According to Airbnb advisor Chip Conley, speaking during a recent Plug and Play Tech Center event, “digital nomads have gone mainstream.”
“The hotel industry, the global hotel industry, has done a really poor job of creating an extended-stay product. ... Nobody wants to stay in one of those units ... very predictable, not particularly interesting,” he says.
“What I think we're going to see is a growing number of people who are going to say, ‘No, I don't have to live in the place that I've always lived, because I can work remotely. I can travel and work from some other place, and therefore I can actually be a little bit more footloose and untethered in terms of where I want to live.’”
Outsite’s Guisset says the silver lining to the current crisis is that "finally the world is going to go remote. We see a lot of people saying they don't want to go back to the office."
Guisset says the concept of remote working might also help combat overtourism and stop people from traveling to the same destinations.
Conley says that because people are more mobile, Wi-Fi is readily available and people want to travel and live in a place for an extended period of time, there are a lot of opportunities in the digital nomad space.
“People aren’t looking for a home away from home, but a home instead of a home.”