Help

Mission

Coworkations' mission is to help people find the travel community that is right for them. Coworkations provides services for digital nomads, remote workers and anyone with the desire to travel while working to find and compare digital retreats and travel groups travelling now around the world.

What is a coworkation?

A coworkation / digital retreat / travel while working group typically travels place to place offering a program of accommodation, coworking and group activities, some of them even organize flights between destinations for you.

What are coworkation trips like?

A typical trip will be 1 month, but they come in all shapes and sizes, some groups let you join for as little as a couple of weeks to try out remote working, and others offer hefty discounts if you buy into a 3, 6 or 12 month itinerary. Most groups go to a place and explore the area for a month or more as a group – some groups do more wild things, we've had listings for groups that have ran trips on boats, cruise ships, trains and even safari convoys.

How much does a coworkation cost?

You can expect to spend around $2000 USD for a private room on a 1 month coworkation which includes accommodation, coworking, activities + the overhead of managing a group of people doing that.

If you want to learn more you can check out our report on digital retreat travel trends to see roughly how the industry currently looks across the 75 communities we list.

How many travel groups are on the site?

We currently list 75 communities that have taken over 1000 trips.

I would like to add my travel group to Coworkations

Awesome, glad to have you on board, go ahead and list your coworkation, if you already have content on the site we'll hook you up to manage that, if not we'll walk you through setting up your listing.

I would like to manage my listing on Coworkations

Sure thing, if you go ahead and list your coworkation we'll hook you up.

I would like to add my coworking space to Coworkations

You're more than welcome to! If you offer accommodation and activities you probably want to list yourself. If you're a coworking office you might want to take out an advert.

I thought listing on Coworkations was free?

Yeah it was, but free apps don't make money – don't worry though – we didn't delete your content, our paying members can still access it – but if you want the public to see it then you'll need to go ahead and list your coworkation.

How do I become a digital nomad?

Good question! You'll need a remote job, I'm a freelance contractor, which is a pretty flexible way to do it, though I've also met plenty of people working full-time or running their own businesses. There's no one way to be a nomad, you'll need money to pay your bills and a backpack, and everyone does it differently. You don't even need the backpack, I've seen some really ludicrous suitcases too.

You also don't need to go on a coworkation to become a digital nomad, but they can be a great way to dip your toe in the water, or grab yourself 30+ friends if you're feeling the lonely on the road, a lot of my friends and myself dip in and out of travel groups, and spend a decent amount of our solo travel meeting up with friends we made on the way.

How do I get a remote job?

Pieter made a site called Remote OK that shows all remote jobs available today. Applying to jobs can be challenging, there might be thousands of people applying for a job with 1 position. Remote working is a perk in a job, many people want it, few still get it unfortunately! The best advice is, get highly skilled at what you do until you're hired.

I'm writing an article about Coworkations, can we use your data?

Sure! You can use any data on the site and take screenshots of Coworkations as long as you reference us as "Coworkations" and link back! Thanks 🙂️

I would like to change my membership from monthly to yearly or lifetime

When you change from monthly to yearly, you'll be pro-rated for the cost. When you change from monthly/yearly to lifetime, we'll refund your last payment if it's within 30 days of changing.

I need an invoice/receipt

A receipt is sent by Stripe on every payment to your email address.

I want to close my account

You can close your account from your settings page

I would like a refund

If you were charged for renewal but didn't want to remain a member, use the feedback form at the bottom left to drop us a message. We can only refund the last rewewal payment.

How do you make money?

Coworkations mostly makes money from community listings and membership fees as well as advertising.

Why isn't Coworkations free?

Remember all those cool startups you used that were free but then they were acquired, shut down and now don't exist anymore? It's because free apps don't make money, and therefore can't survive:

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, I have prepared this handy chart:

	Free	Paid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it's hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it's culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

— Maciej from Pinboard.

So if you want Coworkations to survive, please support it and become a paid member

What is the tech stack?

HTML, CSS, JS and Python hosted with DigitalOcean on Ubuntu running NGINX.

Any frameworks?

Yes, Bootstrap, Django, jQuery and Vue.js, learn more on my website.