Roam has constructed an international housing network for digital nomads

Haha that's what the fad is becoming! I've been to many "nomad" cities and always avoid meeting so-called nomads - and cringe when I see one in a cafe who brought 2 external monitors and is having a "standup" call...

Different strokes for different folks. Many people travel with no particular expectation of engaging on any kind of deep level with the local community of a place they're visiting for a few weeks, and engaging in a multinational community of people with a shared interest in travel, remote working and potentially even complementary knowledge and skillsets isn't necessarily a less worthwhile thing than hanging out with locals as the novelty foreigner. More to the point, unless they massively overdo forced socialisation, the two shouldn't be mutually exclusive, and a well-run programme ought to have some non-commercial interaction with local people built in anyway.

tbh I'd have thought the community aspect was the sole justification for choosing a Roam over an alternative short term rental

That is Roam's entire value add. The large majority of digital nomads are looking to find likeminded individuals with the same constraints in the same foreign city as they are. Similar to hostels when backpacking.

If you want to be integrated into the communities of whom your traveling you want to be crashing on their couches or in the very least renting a local Airbnb.

> I travel to be integrated into the communities in which I am traveling, not to hang out with other travelers.

Same here, and it seems there are very few businesses catering to us. Unfortunately, I think we are in the minority so that won't likely change soon.

Any advice on easing the stress of finding the next place? We use skyscanner to find cheap flights from where we are, Craig's List a ton, and then random searches online for 'furnished apartments {destination}".

> It's basically like paying SF rent, but in countries with a third the cost of living.

Come to Chiang Mai and pay 1/20th :)

Asia is incredibly inexpensive, can't believe how much money I've blown on rent in the western hemisphere over the last 15 years.

> Being a digital nomad is definitely stressful. You have to constantly look for a good place to work.

Indeed, finding the next spot is typically time consuming and hit or miss, particularly when trying to do so via the internet.

Hey cut them some slack, PR articles got to follow certain grammar standards! /s

Logistically I don't that what you describe would actually work. What if you show up and a place is fully booked?

As a digital nomad myself, the difference I see with Roam is it comes with a working space and therefore a network of like-minded people. At a hotel your Wi-Fi might suck, you'd still have to scramble to find a coffee shop to work from, and other tenants would likely be people on holiday rather than digital nomads.

Yes this would be much more interesting. I don't see much value (for me) in what is just overpriced co-living space. What would be useful would be a kind of subscription/housing-as-a-service approach. You pay $X month for membership, give four weeks notice that you'll be arriving in Y city on a given date, and you get back an email with a booking you can confirm or reject.

The problem is that as a nomad 1) a lot of time is wasted looking for good housing 2) you do have to understand the dynamics of the local market to find the best deals since AirBNB is often not the best path and 3) it is stressful knowing you'll be homeless at the end of the month.

I think many nomads aren't deciding where to go on a whim but have pretty clear itineraries of what countries they'll be visiting and how long their visas last. A company that could work with such nomads to offer long-term housing planning could save a lot of time and money.

Then again it's not really clear how big such a market really is.

I did a month at Roam Bali last year and it was super common for folks to show up for a couple weeks, meet people around the place, and then all rent a bungalow somewhere nearby instead of staying at Roam for the rest of their journey. They're really going to have to do something to encourage people to stick around if they want to avoid that happening (lower rates? better community?)

It was a good experience overall but if I were ever back in Ubud I'd go out on my own now that I know the area a bit better instead of paying Roam rates for the package deal.

I think the MO is generally to sweeten up the journalist, not the paper; actual paid adverts need to be marked as such. Roam will have a PR agency with relationships with journalists who they keep sweet, and will occasionally suggest should write articles about their clients.

I think it's less about paying NYT and more about finding a story that they think their readers want to read. If NYT content were just advertisements / sponsored content, people wouldn't read it, and that'd hurt NYT's brand. I doubt they paid for this.

This is the NYT magazine; I see it as more like travel writing than anything else. One of the downsides of digital articles is that it's no longer clear which section of the paper they're in and therefore whether they should be considered reporting, investigative reporting, reprinted press releases, "lifestyle", or whatever.

I suspect they "paid" simply by having an interesting enough story, giving free accomodation to the writer of the article, possibly other expenses included, and giving access to the founder.

It's not exactly a pure puff piece either. The writer (https://twitter.com/chaykak) puts in subtle clues that he regards it as a Ballardian dystopia, and has retweeted someone's description of his article as "The Talented Mr Ripley, but with digital nomads"

As has been mentioned, it's not a case of paying, it's simply doing the job of PR.

It depends on the cost structure of the PR contract - it's quite likely they just provided services for free (and then paid for transport). Which isn't dissimilar to pretty much all PR work. Although when I used to do video game reviews a long time ago, the PR agency would actually had to prove ROI over the RRP of the review copy of the game (£40) sent out, rather than the unit cost (a few pence for the DVD + postage) - so the "cost" of the journalist visit might be booked at a much higher rate.

Traditionally, the value is based on the AVE (some agencies still use AVE...) vs perceived uplift in interest. When you should start worrying about integrity is when there are follow links in the article with some kind of explicit UTM tracking. Something getting increasingly pervasive with the digital PR/SEO side of things.

House exchange services are well-established, though mostly used for holidays. (eg homexchange.com)

> The only advantage maybe is you meet fellow nomads.

These coworker/coliving spaces advertise heavily in the digital nomad community and there’s often a suggestion that hanging around fellow nomads will magically make useful new connections and boost their businesses. Maybe there are some entrepreneurs who benefit from that kind of socializing, but a lot of digital nomads are a solitary bunch – if not outright hostile to other nomads who, they fear, might compete with them for clients.

They advertise on airbnb:

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/21940028

https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/14222898

The Miami location is $120/night for 7-29 nights, and $79/night for 30+ nights.

The Roam website [1] falls into the standard "travel booking site antipattern" of not giving any sort of pricing overview and instead forcing the user to randomly throw dates into the booking form.

[1] https://www.roam.co/places/miami

I wonder how much market research did they do before releasing this.

Or maybe this is aimed at a very specific group within the nomad community, but you have to be in it to know?

Carbon footprint of flying is around 0.2kg CO2/mile, carbon footprint of commuting by car is around 0.4kg CO2/mile.

So a car commuter with a 20 mile commute emits 2 tonnes of CO2 per year; a digital nomad without a car commute would need to fly around 20,000 miles a year to get the same amount of carbon emission -- which is the equivalent of two return flights from London to Bangkok, or 10-11 return flights from London to Lisbon.

So they are roughly on the same order of magnitude as a suburban car commute, but could go substantially higher with weekly return flights...