I think it's a fascinating idea, operating a team on the basis of permanent remote work with occasional team work "retreats" when periods of heavy innovation and interaction are needed.
Many people from my experience say that, given the option to work remotely or in office, they would prefer a flexible option that lets them come into the office maybe 2 or 3 days a week and otherwise work remotely. The idea seems to be that a lot of people like having human interaction and teambuilding, but not paying for that connection with 5 full commutes a week and 8 hours a day in a cubicle.
The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year seems like it could theoretically be an alternative, providing that human connection but not demanding an outdated office lifestyle.
In theory, anyways.
I'm interested to see if this kind of thing becomes a major perk/attraction of the next generation of startups, much like the attractive offices of today's tech giants were "revolutionary" in the aughts. Then we can look forward to the big guys trying to copy the model and creating a horrific corporatized version of it.
Forcing me to take a week or two away from my family multiple times a year would be enough to get me to quit.
There's a reason I choose to work remotely. I don't mind working closely with others, but leaving the household for two weeks straight simply isn't feasible, and certainly not more than once a year.
These conversations often boil down into dichotomies when if you've ever been part of a team you'll know there's tonnes of compromise and negotiation going on in professional settings.
People make comments on either side because they feel they would enjoy X or Y, but they're not meaning to imply that we all hoover up the cool-aid and sacrifice all we have for it. Zdragnar doesn't come to the retreats because they would rather spend time with their family, most places would understand that or at least accept that it's your choice. If your boss doesn't get it, then maybe they'll do you the favour of firing you and you can find a team that does get it.
Of course, so the best you can do is try and find a job or negotiate some terms that work best for you. But what I see is this false dichotomy that just don't represent the real world and kind of stifle useful conversation.
It's not a matter of "Good for family" or "Bad for family", it's a diverse world out there. Some people work away from home for a full 14 days and then have a full week at home of no work, for some people that's a great compromise. Some people have nothing else, so they like the interaction they get from work, for another example.
Work-from-home was pretty much the standard up until 1900 or so, at least for the vast majority of people. It's only since trains and motor vehicles we've been able to commute.
a factory worker in a european city in 1900 would not be working from home. (his home would probably be close to the factory yes, but not at home).
Also, raising children and making them spend time in education is only a relatively recent invention. Prior to ww1, child labour was common, especially as a farmer.
The standard varied widely from place to place. In coastal areas it was common for men to go away to sea for months at a time. In fact that still happens today in some countries.
Then what do you mean by work from home? For agricultural, I guess you mean work at the farm, which can also be the home? And for craft, the workshop and the home are together?
The pure mendacity of this statement strikes me as appalling and frankly entitled and classist.
Thousands of workers don't have the enormous privilege of seeing their family every night. All those travel workers, remote health workers, and oil field workers manage to make it work.
This is of course completely valid, but to provide a countering anecdote, looking for companies that do this kind of recurring retreat is a strong positive signal in my current search for a remote dev job.
Why are you acting like you're going to be told on Thursday that you have to get on a flight across the country Sunday night?
I've known several people who work for companies like this. It's always been scheduled months in advance such that by the time you go on one the next one is typically already locked in. And even the long ones have been 4-5 days, not "weeks." It just seems like you're intentionally making this into a strawman when "travel for work 4-5 days at a time, 1-3 times a year" is a perfectly reasonable job requirement. And even with all that being said, there's nothing wrong with just not wanting to do that.
> The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year
Note that "week or two" and "1-4 times a year". It isn't a strawman, it is literally the topic.
As for
> Why are you acting like you're going to be told on Thursday that you have to get on a flight across the country Sunday night?
I don't believe I ever expressed that the trips are surprises. It isn't a matter of planning, it is a matter of the duration being a burden.
I have a large family, and while I wouldn’t spend two full consecutive weeks away ever, I could probably do 4-6 weeks a year, fly out Sunday, fly back Friday evening. Except this last year cuz my wife was homeschooling the kids and she would’ve gone insane, but they’ll be back in school this year so I could imagine it happening. Even two weeks straight is fine if I was flown back on the weekend.
That depends on the company. Some do, most dont. But they will not really give you much grief over it. I know several people who did it. Usually after 2nd or 3rd time they would not do it. Because the spouse usually figured out pretty quick 'oh I am sitting here by myself when I could be at home doing the same thing...'
If 90% of the team attends and significant work is done at the retreat (and that work excludes the person who couldn't come), it's "optional" not optional.
I totally understand, there's a reason I used the word "fascinating" and not "exciting"
I would personally be open to trying it once, but I have no idea if it would fit in my life as a regular occurrence or if it would be miserable and make me want to quit.
I did have a job previously that required 2-3 days of travel 4 times a year, and was able to make it work.
In fact, a 2 week trip to a cabin to focus on work and team building sounds fantastic... for me. My spouse, on the other hand, would not be having a great time. It certainly has a whiff of unintentional ageism.
What makes you think it's unintentional? The goal is absolutely to filter out people whose families are more important to them than whatever shitty webapp they're making.
For many people, it isn't much work at all. Maybe they dont have kids, or maybe their kids are old enough to not need as much supervision, or maybe they have other family or friends who can help chip in.
That isn't my case, but I am also not going to assume the worst of someone for whom it isn't an issue and is simply not considerate.
Then again, I have also avoided working for any company that failed to commit to a healthy work-life balance.
Sure, it would work with the spouse I have now, but I would have been mortified bringing my ex with me. There are good reasons I left him, and having to watch over him at inappropriate times was part of it.
This is how my team worked pre-pandemic for the last ~5 years.
Our team is fully remote (US and CA) and our industry has major conference events throughout the year around the world. So 3-4 times a year our whole team would go to a conference, then stay for an extra few days to do planning, an innovation sprint, or whatever else in person.
Many people would bring their families and stay an extra week to make it a vacation, especially in places like Paris, Vienna, US west coast in the winter, etc.
> The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods
Oh god no, no, no, a million times NO.
I'm a mostly introverted person. I would MUCH rather go to the office 5 days a week for 8 hours each day than have to be stuck living with a group of coworkers for 2 weeks straight in a house in the woods.
After 8 hours of work the last thing I need is being forced to spend the rest of the 16 hours in the day with the same group of people.
If you're going to do a meet-up for a fully remote company, please do it in a location with several hotels and let every employee arrange their own accommodation reimbursed. Keep mandatory activities to no more than 6-8 hours a day, don't pressure people to spend their evenings and weekends drinking with the company. Outside of meeting hours, let people enjoy the place however they like -- adults are more than capable of figuring out recreational activities on their own, and you don't need to provide structure 24/7. If you pick Las Vegas I'm sure a whole bunch of employees will self-organize themselves and go gambling and drinking, but I have no interest in that stuff and you'll probably find me in some national park during the weekend.
In these discussions, where there is fierce opposition on this question, wouldn't it make sense to explicitly filter for this on hiring and have some companies that look for [for lack of a better word] extroverted people, and others for introverts?
Sure if you work in an industry where you're competing among a very small pool of highly-skilled specialists, you can't afford to miss out on key talent. But if we're talking about web devs for a start-up, why not?
I think it would be extremely counterproductive for a company to filter on extroverted people for most positions. Maybe it barely makes sense for a startup sales or PR to be extroverted because you kind of expect them to bring in connections from their (hopefully vast) personal network, but for the vast majority of positions I think you'd be looking at false signals and missing out on some extremely capable, focused people by blocking out introverts from your search.
Introverts are VERY GOOD at getting shit done. Introverts aren't opposed to teamwork and collaboration, it just means that when we get off work, we usually chill alone or occasionally with 1-2 close friends, instead of partying.
I think the hybrid model (2-3 days in office, interspersed with focus days of remote work) is far superior to the once-a-quarter-retreat.
The hybrid model builds routine and trust, lets you respond to unexpected snags and complications quickly (~1-2 days latency), and allows for in-office creativity and then going home to execute on those ideas rapidly. It also fits reasonably well into existing family & daycare routines.
The retreat model could work for more established businesses in industries that don't change a lot, but that's not a startup. The biggest problem I see is that it encourages a high-latency, "go off for a quarter and work on this problem as your manager has defined it and then we'll all get together for show & tell and plan the next quarter" model. Since you know you'll see folks at the next retreat but it's a pain to schedule time with them beforehand, it incentivizes you to work within your silo and solve problems yourself and then have something to show at the retreat. We know this is a poor model for software development, from a few decades of experience. You lose the adaptability and low-latency communication of being in-person with your teammates on a weekly basis.
The big disadvantage of the hybrid model is that it doesn't do anything about the concentration of startups in a small number of hyper-dense metro areas, nor the exorbitant cost of rent in those areas. Arguably if that is the #1 problem facing the world these days (and it may be) the industry you want to go into is real estate, not startups, though.
I see this sentiment posted in reply to nearly every post on hybrid work without any real justification. As someone who had a hybrid setup before the pandemic, going in 1-2 days a week, I did not value being able to live far away from my employer. Conversely, I did value having a place nearby where I could go to work and reliably be physically proximate to my coworkers.
It's not like there was no freedom to work elsewhere either. When I wanted to work somewhere else for a week or two I'd work it out with management, no problem.
Some people really want remote work, more power to them it looks like there will be plenty of that post-pandemic, but let's not pretend that many people won't be happy with the office being a regular part of their week.
For context, I find most people who were full-time in-office workers (and still live in the same spot) prior to the pandemic are the ones who are in-favor for a flex-remote policy. This is all based on local sampling of my coworkers and my wife's coworkers, not necessarily representative of the population.
>I think it's a fascinating idea, operating a team on the basis of permanent remote work with occasional team work "retreats" when periods of heavy innovation and interaction are needed.
This is how Automattic did it before the pandemic[1]. It works because they're clear during the hiring process that this sort of travel will be expected. I've always found it very valuable for getting everyone on the same page and for team morale/cohesion.
> The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year seems like it could theoretically be an alternative, providing that human connection but not demanding an outdated office lifestyle.
Before COVID, my full-WFH company did this. We didn't have folks stay in the same house, but we did get everybody together 2 times a year.
You still need to rent spaces because you need a place to meet, and the existing meeting room places are rather anodyne. We'd rent out a winery or similar.
I think the flexible preference is an acknowledgment of deep focused work needing to be preformed away from the office. The modern office is not meant for this type of work. Likewise an acknowledgment that some work is best done in person.
Job Candidate: So how much vacation time do you offer?
Interviewer: We offer one-month paid vacation with your co-workers at an exotic location of our choosing. Oh, and we decide when you take those vacations
"Oh, and we decide when you take those vacations."
This is sort-of normal elsewhere, actually. Even in Europe, employer has sway over vacations. Not a dictatorial power, but No will often be No for a certain period. It makes sense in many industries; you can't have a power plant running with too few qualified people present.
Edit: downvoted for a perfectly neutral response. Yes, looking at my own country's labor code, vacations are determined by the employer. They will likely meet you halfway and approve vacations for July and August (slow season) without too much hassle, but they do not have to. As said above, it makes sense; certain skeleton crews must be maintained at all times in many industries.
In Europe, worked in couple of countries. All the employers had the right to force you to take vacation at a certain date I have never seen it done. I am talking about software industry ofc.
In financial industry AFAIK it's somewhat known tactic - against fraud. So you're required to take PTO every so often in specific minimal-sized chunk, because it acts both as sort-of chaos monkey, and exposes possible fraud issues when whatever schemes fail due to missing a person they depend on to execute flawlessly.
Generally, the guidance in the US is that employees who perform/have the ability to perform sensitive financial actions take a minimum of two consecutive weeks off per year (that's the guidance from the FDIC, Federal Reserve, and NY DFS). There's no requirement that the employer dictate when their employees take that time, just that their vacation/time off policy must require it.
In the UK lots of companies shut down between Christmas and New Years. Some of our suppliers in Europe also shutdown for a couple weeks in August.
I'm actually a bit surprised that you haven't come across it before because I've always been under the impression that these winter and summer shutdowns are pretty common.
In Switzerland for example, doctors can take vacation as they want (apart form Christmas/New Year/Easter when its strictly managed by hospital), but they need to apply 6-12 months in advance.
Another example of the situation above are factory workers, ie in Germany there are millions of cars moving south every summer during specific weeks valid for their part of the country, when +-whole factory goes out.
> In Switzerland for example, doctors can take vacation as they want (apart form Christmas/New Year/Easter when its strictly managed by hospital)
You need a more diverse workforce. Where I am, the Persian guy will work every Jan 1 as long as we guarantee him the first day of spring off. The Muslim lady will do Dec 24/25 as long as she gets some other specific day off.
The hard days to schedule are “family day” and other non-cultural holidays.
> You need a more diverse workforce. Where I am, the Persian guy will work every Jan 1 as long as we guarantee him the first day of spring off.
This is only a solution some of the time. I worked through Christmas / New Year's at eBay the year I joined, because I hadn't accrued enough vacation for it to make sense to take vacation.
But there was no work to do, because... everyone else was on vacation. Having me in the office benefited no one.
Some employers just start you off with 3 or whatever accrued days of vacation, or let you go into the negatives within reason.
Though I’ve often try to work the non-holiday days around Christmas because it lets me clean everything up without anyone asking for much. But we always keep a skeleton team around in case (critical operation).
> Some employers just start you off with 3 or whatever accrued days of vacation, or let you go into the negatives within reason.
That solves the problem considered from my perspective, but it's less good from eBay's perspective. What the company really wants is to make the vacation at that time compulsory. If I have nothing better to do, under the system I experienced, I can still come into the office and eBay has to pay me despite the fact that they have nothing for me to do.
This is just optimization. Work when most people take vacation and you can have an easy few weeks, then spend your vacation when you want.
The other tactic I saw was block out vacation, but don’t actually take it so you actually have time to catch up on work. Every leaves you alone (because they think you’re off).
The chaos of the NHS beaurocracy in the UK means that doctors don't get rota for their 4-6 month rotations earlier than usually 2-6 weeks before they start, so you aren't able to plan ahead further than the rotation you're in
It happens whenever a minimal presence is needed, even in the software industry, e.g. for support.
In general management prefers team members sort things out among themselves. E.g. one goes on leave during the first week of the school holiday the other on the second week.
Yeah I think it's more something done in industrial contexts (shut down the factory for two weeks, etc). Though definitely less painful when you end up with 6 weeks a year of days off in total.
Is this not the case in most of the world?
me and my SO both work in areas in which have to operate 24/7. (healthcare & telecom).
Usually, you either arrange this far in advance with your team. (My SO has to give in her holiday period preference for summer atleast a year in advance) or you manage it with coworkers (my case, so atleast one of our team is present during the summer months).
Working during the peak holiday seasons usually isn't too bad because vacations are more expensive, so going outside of season is better. (but not possible if you have school aged kids).
Also, tons of downtime to get errands fixed that have been left all year.
As a child, this always sucked. Whenever I had a day off, they did too!
The government also cut back on their professional development days (probably because it created a problem for parents to arrange childcare), but I heard these days became useless anyway as the budget for them got eliminated.
Europe is a big place. While I think my employer (UK scale-up) reserves the right to decide when you take holidays, I've never seen this enforced, even over Christmas.
When I worked for Microsoft China we’d have a group offsite every year to some Chinese city or other Asian locale. It really isn’t that great to tour with your coworkers, at least compared to going on a relaxing vacation on your own terms.
Linus from LinusTechTips has done basically this (a while ago when the team was smaller). Take the team to Mexico (which includes his wife). They made videos while there of course, but I imagine there was some downtime for everyone except maybe Linus?
While I don't love the idea of Airbnb-ing with coworkers as a required part of the job, I'm a little surprised at the hostility being expressed to the broader notion of "remote workers are expected to travel to meet with coworkers in person for a week a few times a year." I've been working in Silicon Valley for about two decades now, and literally every company that I've been at that offered what I'd call Truly Remote work -- e.g., it's not that the office is in San Jose and you're out in Tracy, but the office is in San Jose and you're in San Diego or Orlando or Boise -- had this as at least an implicit expectation. If Bob was usually working at his home hundreds of miles away, there would be a few times a year Bob would be in the office. The company would put Bob up at a nearby extended stay hotel, "Bob in Office" would be marked on the company calendar, etc.
So has this become a terrible horrible no-good dealbreaker in the last few years, and the place I'm currently at that still does this[1] is a weird, out-of-step mutant? I see all the "this can't be expected of people who have families, that's utter madness!" comments, and, I mean, these are basically business trips, aren't they? I can't imagine the idea of "business trip" is a dealbreaker, at least for most people.
I kind of wonder if what's causing the "hell, no" reaction isn't the "let's spend a week together every quarter" part, it's the "let's spend a week together at a vacation home as if we're all college buddies every quarter" part. Which, again, I get: as a relative introvert, that sounds dread-inducing in a way that the week in the extended stay hotel does not. But if the company has no physical office space and you do want to have in-person meetings occasionally, you're going to have to figure out something that involves actual sleeping arrangements and collaborative space.
[1] I'm not sure any of those remote workers are left at this point, but that's not related to their remote status, AFAIK.
- Some people don't want any business trips at all. Ever.
- Some people are ok with a short trip 1x-2x/year. But the traditional business trip, you stay in your own hotel room and attend business events during something close to normal business hours. You can general dine on your own.
- This Airbnb retreat is not a normal business trip. It's a shared house, shared dining area, and I only assume the expectation is long hours of collaboration and/or socialization.
> This Airbnb retreat is not a normal business trip. It's a shared house...
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at in my last paragraph -- it's the 24/7 nature that's the most off-putting. For a company that doesn't actually have a physical office, I'm not sure what the best solution here is, but it's possible "renting meeting space in a city we've all agreed on and giving everybody a hotel stipend" is a better approach. (Or if everyone's amenable and it's cheaper, rooms at the same hotel, but still, you know, separate rooms.)
> Some people don't want any business trips at all. Ever.
Well, that's probably something they're going to have to talk about during the interview process. I have been in many jobs where I haven't taken business trips, but I haven't been in any job where the idea of a business trip was completely off the table.
I think in the case of "you're working remotely but you're expected to meet us all a few times a year for a week," that's something that should be made clear by the employer during the interview process. If it's a dealbreaker for the interviewee, so be it.
Well, that's probably something they're going to have to talk about during the interview process.
Agree completely. As I've progressed up the corporate ladder, my travel went from zero (as a plain-old developer) to 2-3x/year for 3-5 days per trip (as an architect and now SDM). It's been a mix of conferences as a vendor, conferences as a consumer, and client site visits. Refusing those would be a sure-fire way to never land an interesting project in the future.
Yeah, I would say the best model here would be rooms at the same hotel (works out cheaper for the company and makes logistics significantly easier) and booking a WeWork office space for a week (do they do that?) or even just having everyone work out of an AirBnB during office hours a la HBO's Silicon Valley.
I personally prefer the traditional hybrid- work 2-3 days/wk in office, remote the rest.
I have a counter anecdote to your anecdote in that only 1 out of the last 5 remote jobs I've held required travel and I was allowed to skip it for that one job.
It really is chaotic for some workers with families to expect 5+ days being away from the home. From taking the kids to school to picking them up, getting groceries, managing after-school activities, helping with home-work, etc. and putting the pressure of 24/7 care on an already strained parent for an entire week is not always easy. Some parents also do coaching for the school sports teams. Ordinarily you're working 8 hours a day and available for the remainder of the day. On a "business trip" you're gone the full 24 hours; the impact becomes even more amplified with that.
Since you have so many other priorities that come before your job perhaps you are not suitable for a job at all. At least not for one that requires something as simple as a business trip. McDonald’s does not require business trips for example. No way I would ever hire someone as entitled as you are. In fact, I already fired 2.
Staying with colleagues for a week in a hotel in a city, is something I would not mind. I can take off in the evenings if I want, there is a gym to work out, or places to go to.
But a house in the woods, where I am sharing the bathroom/kitchen, sorry, I don't want that level of closeness. I don't want to be cooped up 24/7 with people I work.
They are colleagues not friends, and you want that professional barrier. As much as startups espouse the "we are a family BS" , I've worked long enough to understand that it is a transaction at the end of the day.
Older me agrees with you. Younger me (-10 years) had a blast sleeping on an outdoor furniture couch in a common area (because there weren’t enough bedrooms) at a company retreat when it was less than 20 of us, and some of those colleagues became long term (life long? TBD) friends. Really depends on where you are in life. I don’t know if I could do it again at 40 with two kids, but it was a life experience worth having at the time.
This doesn't surprise me, although it's a trend I expect to be suppressed due to the pandemic. I've been working permanently remote for over half a decade now and these sorts of trips are common ways to create alignment and camaraderie. With a prior employer I visited Montenegro, Croatia, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland all as part of work to do large-scale planning exercises and team building. Usually we stayed in hotels because they would cut us a deal on room rates and provide conference spaces, but it was not uncommon to also have some or all staff staying in AirBnBs because we had a large enough team that many of the locales we visited didn't have a hotel that could accommodate all of us and it was more economical to use AirBnBs for the overflow rather than two different nearby hotels (from different chains).
As an employee in this situation I preferred staying in the AirBnB to the hotel, since I prefer that style of living, having access to a kitchen, and the more "homey" feel, additionally it's nice being in a more residential area vs being in a more commercial area, especially in Europe where cities tend to be relatively walkable with good public transport. Also because AirBnBs were less expensive, it was easier to negotiate private accommodations vs sharing with a coworker.
Generally I found these sorts of trips to be really high value and pretty much essential in a fully-remote company, to create the sorts of positive relationships with coworkers and camaraderie that help get through difficulties inherent to the work. Large-scale planning exercises also helped significantly with communicating alignment throughout the organization and training customer-facing functions on deeper intricacies of the product that they may not be exposed to daily.
Obviously week long 'retreats' are out of the question for those with very young children/etc, but that's a tiny minority amongst tech workers. If you're childless under 40 and would rather quit than take a few retreats throughout the year, you don't hate the office -- you hate coworkers -- and I highly suggest you start your own business before it becomes an employer's market again.
> Obviously week long 'retreats' are out of the question for those with very young children/etc, but that's a tiny minority amongst tech workers.
Maybe true in expensive cities that aren't family-friendly (Bay Area, I'm looking at you), but once you leave those bubbles it's actually really common for people in tech to have children.
This isn't really a tech thing. It's more of an age thing. Some tech bubbles, especially startup bubbles in places like the Bay Area, end up selecting for young, childless people. Once you age out of the bubble or your company grows up and starts collecting employees from a broader range of ages and locations, you'll be surrounded by parents.
Small sample, but on my current team...
- 1 is an empty nester
- 3 have young children (primary school or younger)
- 2 have no kids
- 2 have older kids (secondary school or college aged)
On my prior team...
- 2 empty nests
- 3 w/ young kids
- 1 w/ older kids
- 3 w/ no kids at all
I think its probably on the rare side at startups, but employees with kids are pretty common at larger companies (>1000). Obviously those places aren't doing full company offsites in an AirBNB
Cooking meals together and having the natural rhythm of multiple days mean that not every topic has to wrap up in the 55 minute slot allocated to it.
I was initially skeptical but am a complete convert to the 3-day, 2-night minimum, stay in a house, grocery shop together and cook every meal in format. (Practical exception as needed, such as for 4/3 trips where the first evening is a late arrival and a dinner out works better.)
The number of topics that got addressed/finalized while chopping vegetables or around a fire pit in the evening is likely at least equal to what we did discussing in structured setting in the living room.
(And yes, it’s a way to make 40 hours of “work” fit into 3 days, while being cheaper than 3 days times 7 people in hotels and restaurants. They can be exhausting and if you don’t like your team in the office, it’s probably not going to get better as ersatz flat mates.)
Reading this entire post and I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.
Love my job, will go the extra mile if necessary and have had many many positive interactions and experiences with coworkers but I do not want cohabitate with any of them ever for any period of time.
Get me a fucking hotel room and ill be happy as a clam between 9am and 7pm for work stuff. Take me out for dinner and drinks if you want some informal team building. Dont torture me though by making me hang out, cook with and sleep near my coworkers for the other 10-12hrs of the day.
We would do this gathering all the leads and architects and spend Monday to Friday at a remote nice cabin to plan out the year with lots of breaks to do whatever you wanted no forced interaction other than the 4-5h of focused work each day. The goal was to make sure people knew each other and personal relationships formed. It helped people understand each other roles and better map their action to stakeholders. It reduced the friction a lot since big architectural decisions would have buy in from everyone.
Away on business for a few days, would you prefer to cook healthy meals in your own kitchen and relax, or do you want yet another calorific restaurant meal?
There are a lot of hotels that offer kitchenettes. Generally, they're long term rentals, but you can get them for a few nights, as well. I'm guessing the large common spaces and more laid back environment are a big draws as well.
I just did an AirBnb with a group of families for just under a week. We almost exclusively at in and the logistics around food was a lot of work. It was probably exacerbated because it was about 20 people with a huge range of ages (many with particular preferences), but not many dietary restrictions. We were concerned upfront about extra food or waste at the end of the trip. Every lunch was "leftovers or sandwiches," the last few meals were also leftovers, and we still threw out an embarrassing amount of food (and had at least 2-3 trips to the grocery store to restock). Want ketchup, salad dressing, or need paprika? Odds are you'll buy a bottle and toss the rest. Decide you want to eat out? You probably have a meals worth of food at home you won't need. We also spent time upfront figuring out if the kitchen had what we needed; like a toaster or a grill.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of cooking at these places. Their knives often suck, the layout isn't usually great, and they'll have cheap cutting boards or the dishwasher won't work.
If it works for people, great. I imagine what works in practice is a few small things to cook at the AirBnB (like eggs or sandwiches) and mix that with takeout. And be ok with the waste and cost (traveling is usually pretty wasteful, anyway).
It really depends on where you end up and what the local culture is around food, cooking and restaurants. I've been to places where restaurants are stellar, but I've also been where you would only get dogfood. Where, when asking locals about eating out, you get an answer like "only tourists are that stupid".
Out of curiosity, mind sharing where you were told the latter? I know what you’re talking about, but I’ve never been anywhere where it’s quite like that.
Last thing I'm going to be doing is cooking while I'm on a business trip. I don't have the time or desire to do that. But kudos to people who find the time and energy to cook their own healthy meals
I was shocked when I went to the US that motels don't tend to have kitchens.
In Australia and NZ, motels have at least a small kitchen area, if not a whole kitchen-diner room, and are like a small apartment really.
Presumably they're hoping to get some team bonding out of this. Everyone in their own hotel rooms doesn't make for a good bonding experience. Everyone with a private space to go back to along with some nice communal living areas works a lot better. Using a hotel would feel like going to a conference or any other usual business travel and the companies doing this are likely looking for a different feel.
My main gripe with B&Bs as opposed to hotels is that not all of them issue invoices, at least in Europe. Whenever I order via AirBnb or Booking.com, the main invoice has to be issued by the owners themselves (AirBinb will issue the invoice for their service fee only). At least this is how it was before the pandemic.
With hotels, I never had any problems. At Hilton, my invoice waited upon arrival. In smaller Italian hotels, they would issue it at the last moment. But it was there. With B&Bs, I had to depend on my luck. They usually said they would issue the invoice, but sometimes they wouldn't. And it's hard to pressure someone living a few countries away.
Idk about other countries, but in Poland you need special VAT invoice that mentioned your company by name and tax id. Regular receipts don't have that.
In certain jurisdictions only documents signed with the blood of firstborns will do. O, and please dont forget the stamps. All of them. O, and make sure the initial of your second name isn't missing, otherwise you might well be someone entirely different and we couldn't even think of processing the request.
And that's just to get reimbursed, for tax purposes we have an extra set of requirements. Of course.
Here are the reasons I've generally preferred airbnbs over hotels:
- price is often better
- more control over location / amenities
- transparent discounts for longer stays. I don't need housekeeping every day, I do need to able to afford a month of lodging sometimes though
- Having a kitchen is really nice. Even if you don't want to cook, it's nice to be able to make coffee, drinks, microwave something
Also, I've found wifi connectivity so much less reliable at hotels than at Airbnbs, but I'm excited about the "host wifi check" tool mentioned in this article
I’m one of them, who only book airbnb when I travel for work. It’s just nicer imo. For the same price it feels cleaner, more homely, better location, more stuff (I lucked out recently and got a series of airbnb with like all the streaming services), etc.
Individual hotel rooms are expensive, single bed shared hotel rooms lack any private space, but apartments can be cheaper than both whilst offering individuals private bedrooms.
For multiday stays being able to just have a normal sized fridge and a kitchen worktop can mean breakfasts and lunches can be done for very cheap... meaning modest sustenance budgets cover evening meals more comfortably.
For stays that straddle weekends the locations of apartments can lead to happier employee weekends than them waking up in the business district due to zoning placing the hotels there (which in a lot of American cities felt like it translated into the eateries being closed at the weekend and only the homeless roaming around as most people live in suburbs that have all the life). Bear in mind most travellers will not have rental vehicles, and public transport can prove indecipherable and confusing, so a lot of people travelling for business are on foot and if they're in a nicer suburb their non-working time can be very comfortable.
Adding to that, it is more flexible compared to a hotel on who and how many people can come. At the startups I worked at, these meetups where usually a weekend of drinking/barbecuing at a lake-house close to the city we are based in, which means people can stay over night, but don't have to, and few things have to be rigorously planned.
Captive audience. Everybody is forced to work/socialize 24 hours/day for as long as the retreat lasts.
Sure, cooking for a group might be less expensive, but I have serious doubts that's a primary reason for using a rental home vs hotel/conference space.
And as an aside, as somebody with dietary restrictions, being forced into dining with people who don't share my diet is very off-putting. Add in my co-workers who are vegetarian, vegan, or completely boring (bland, beige American food is all they'll eat) and it's a nightmare. No thanks.
I can't tell but is this conflating Startups that "Rent" their "office space" via AirBnB? In other words putting "rent" in the "travel" accounting category?
I know a few homeowners and early stage startups who let or rent homes via AirBnB as "offices" for early stage companies who are willing to pay, sometimes, a bit of a premium for the flexibility they provide.
I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of companies spent as much on hotels + airbnb before the pandemic as on office space anyway. Business travel is hella expensive, and salespeople don't stay at Model 8.
The free market means that renters looking for a place to live have to compete with vacationers and business travelers willing to pay hotel nightly prices.
One thing I found fascinating about traveling in Japan is the opposite effect: even in a world-class city like Tokyo, nightly rates on all but top hotels were incredibly cheap: decent hotels I could get $50-80 a night, airbnbs I could find around $20-30 a night. (I imagine it's much higher in peak tourist season, but I was visiting in February). The ample housing supply lead to a glut of stays which made it really cheap as a visitor. It's really a case study for free market housing done right, in my opinion.
The issue here is that we've enacted heavy government action (generally at the state/local level) to regulate development/redevelopment of housing and subdivision of lots, but we haven't had corresponding heavy government action to maintain an ample supply of housing. We can't have it both ways.
One solution to the housing crisis is to have government build hundreds of thousands of units of housing, flood the market with cheap housing units, and drive housing costs down (and ideally also provide for the poor at the same time).
Another is to systematically remove barriers to subdivision and development and let the free market go wild.
Finally, we can do nothing except blame companies like Airbnb and hopefully by banning those short term rentals we can keep our rent price increases to 10% this year instead of 20%.
Government construction of lots of housing was tried in the 60s and late 50s, with numerous public housing projects. It's generally considered a failure, because once the units were constructed the government had little incentive to maintain them. It was also a key pillar in enforcing de facto racial/class segregation.
Removing barriers to subdivision and construction can work though. That's the approach that Houston takes, and it succeeds at keeping home prices low, even if you do get occasional negative consequences like homes built inside a flood reservoir.
> Government construction of lots of housing was tried in the 60s and late 50s, with numerous public housing projects. It's generally considered a failure, because once the units were constructed the government had little incentive to maintain them. It was also a key pillar in enforcing de facto racial/class segregation.
Sure, but evidence of incompetently developed infrastructure doesn't mean it's impossible to develop infrastructure competently (although we americans do tend to assume our government will build infrastructure with maximal incompetence, and our government in turn often does). Anyways, it is an option even if it's not the best one.
> Removing barriers to subdivision and construction can work though. That's the approach that Houston takes, and it succeeds at keeping home prices low, even if you do get occasional negative consequences like homes built inside a flood reservoir.
yep. I don't like the car-centric development style that Houston is built as, but you can't argue with results (meaning, affordability).
I don't see how your assertion contradicts OP's. A regulation barring more dense developments solves the defection problem that a pact between property owners in a free market would have.
As long as the free market persists, then even if all property owners would benefit from fewer new developments, they have no practical way to enforce a pact to not build new developments, so their situation is a prisoner's dilemna where the best option is to build.
The same principle applies to price cutting. If all companies could enforce a pact to not cut prices, then they could extract economic rent via above-market prices and inflated profit margins, but absent government enforced price floors, the best strategy for any given company is to reduce prices to gain market share, to the extent that their production costs allow.
People living in major in-demand cities that provide higher average income and life expectancy than the rest of the country SHOULD have to compete with vacationers and business travelers. Long-term residents of such cities are geographically privileged, and Airbnb is a way to share that privilege with less geographically privileged people whose long-term residence is in cities that people don't visit for vacation/business.
You should also know that the "Airbnb harms rental affordability" narrative is one that was deliberately spread by the Hotel lobby via its astoturfing campaign:
Many people from my experience say that, given the option to work remotely or in office, they would prefer a flexible option that lets them come into the office maybe 2 or 3 days a week and otherwise work remotely. The idea seems to be that a lot of people like having human interaction and teambuilding, but not paying for that connection with 5 full commutes a week and 8 hours a day in a cubicle.
The idea of taking the team out to an airbnb (or some other communal living arrangement) in the woods or by the beach for a week or two to launch a new major initiative 1-4 times a year seems like it could theoretically be an alternative, providing that human connection but not demanding an outdated office lifestyle.
In theory, anyways.
I'm interested to see if this kind of thing becomes a major perk/attraction of the next generation of startups, much like the attractive offices of today's tech giants were "revolutionary" in the aughts. Then we can look forward to the big guys trying to copy the model and creating a horrific corporatized version of it.