Two trends might converge this summer to keep Australians up or down the coast longer than usual.
The first trend is a desire for a longer-than-usual holiday after a tough year. Make that a tough couple of years.
The second trend is the normalisation of remote work and working from home. The days of having to be in the office five days a week are over for millions of workers.
Put the trends together and you have "hybrid holidays", where families extend their stay away by working remotely for some of their time on the road.
NBNCo commissioned YouGov to ask Australians if they were considering a hybrid holiday this year and around three in four said yes, indeed they were.
The most popular option was to do it outside of school holidays, which 35 per cent said they'd prefer.
But the next most popular was immediately after Christmas, which means those hybrid holidays are probably being planned right about now.
So what do you need to do in advance to ensure you can work productively while away?
For most hybrid holidaymakers, good wifi will be priority number-one.
The NBN rollout is now finished and more than 8.3 million Australian homes and businesses are connected to the network, with around 77 per cent of them on download speed plans of 50Mbps or higher, which should be more than enough speed for most desk jobs.
Before you go, ask your accommodation provider if they provide free NBN or other internet, and ask them three questions:
- Will your plan allow us to operate multiple devices?
- Is there a data limit or is your plan unlimited?
- What speed tier plan are you on? (If they don't know, they could just run a quick, free speed test online and send you a pic of the result. There is information about the tiers on the nbn website.)
Travel booking sites are also now allowing you to filter your search for properties that have wifi. Booking.com, for example, labels certain properties as "work-friendly".
If you're heading to remote parts and you want to know if the NBN even exists there, they have a "check your address" feature on their website too.
If there's no NBN in an area, but there is a 3G or 4G phone network, some mobile plans will allow you to "tether" or use your phone as a hotspot for your laptop or tablet. But beware of data limits on mobile plans, which are usually far less than wifi plans.
For a more sustainable solution in no-NBN areas, there are wireless internet plans with dongles or small portable modems on offer with the larger telcos.
Julie Watson from NSW has a video production business called Stronger Than My Excuses and once wrote an e-book called Join the Digital Nomads.
She spent eight weeks in April travelling through the NSW outback while working remotely and she also did it for three months in Croatia in 2018.
"I look at it this way: I can work from my office or I can be travelling the outback working," she said.
Her tips?
- Get up early each day and do your online work in the quiet of the morning as campsites can get chatty once everyone is up and about;
- Save offline work to do in the rare places that don't have wifi; and
- Have a clear demarcation line between work time and holiday time — for both your sake and the sake of your travel companions.
And in case you're wondering whether you can claim part of your accommodation costs because you're working on the road?
"No, I wouldn't be claiming it," said accountant Dr Adrian Raftery, aka "Mr Taxman". But nice try.
Joel Gibson is the author of KILL BILLS!, a Today Show regular and a Nine columnist.
Original article published here on nine.com.au on 18 December 2021.