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 - Do It Foundation photo - The rapid rise of the digital nomad and Costa Rica’s competitive opportunity to win the hearts of an emerging market |
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Published
Friday, April 9, 2021
By Tony Darrick Baker There’s a booming new trend in 2021, and that's in the rise of the Digital Nomad. If you’re not familiar with the concept, digital nomads are defined as people who have chosen to embrace a location-independent, technology-enabled lifestyle that allows them to travel and work remotely, anywhere in the world. Geographic arbitrage was once almost exclusively for retirees looking to enhance their quality of life and make the most of their retirement pensions and savings by moving to a preferred climate with a lower cost of living. Today, a whole new demographic of travelers can make the most of their income and build their career while living a life that most people only experience in retirement or while on a vacation.  The popularity of working from home has been thrust upon the world due to the covid-19 pandemic. Millions of people are escaping the confines of their office cubicles and exploring the world. A study conducted by MBO Partners shows that in 2020, the number of U.S. traditional salary office employees working as digital nomads grew 96 percent, from 3.2 million to 6.3 million. This is a huge increase in this type of digital nomad. Until 2020 the majority of remote workers were freelance contractors, independent consultants, and solo entrepreneurs. The covid-19 pandemic has forced companies to adopt remote working lifestyles or face shutting down completely. The “work-from-home” requirement enacted by many corporations in 2020 has quickly transformed into “work-from-anywhere” policies and opportunities for tech-savvy travelers. The MBO Partners study revealed that the amount of U.S. digital nomads has grown by 49% to more than 10.9 million people since 2019. This growth trend is expected to double again in the next year. Many digital nomads will travel for years, regularly moving across a variety of countries. Others are nomadic for shorter periods, simply taking “workcations” lasting from a few weeks to several months a year. Boutique Hotels and short-term home renters struggling with pandemic travel restrictions love digital nomads. This new community of tourists typically stay weeks and months at a time at the same location, all the while influencing family, friends, and co-workers that follow them on social media. Digital nomads are often low-maintenance guests that have a simple daily routine of work, rest, and play.  Remote workers require reliable high-speed Internet service, a quiet work environment for video and audio conferencing, a safe place for their laptop or tablet, refrigerated food and beverage storage, weekly laundry facilities or services, and convenient access to restaurants, shopping, and their preferred natural environment to relax in after work. According to the MBO Partners study, Digital nomads work in a wide variety of fields, including information technology (12%), education and training (11%), consulting, coaching, and research (11 %), sales, marketing, and PR (9%), and creative services (8 %) with other fields represented equally. The unifying theme of these professions is that they can be performed remotely using digital tools and the Internet. Countries are already beginning to take notice of the huge increase in the demand of digital nomads to relocate to tourist destinations. This is extremely important to local economies struggling as tourism is not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels for another 3 years. Indonesia is rolling out a new 5-year visa to help attract digital nomads to their country. “Long-term visas have become a prerequisite for the world’s digital nomads to consider Bali their second home,” Indonesia’s Tourism Minister Sandiaga Uno said. Likewise, throughout the Caribbean, countries are developing or enhancing their campaigns to attract digital nomads. With more than a third of its GDP coming from tourism, Barbados faced a crushing economic disaster as the covid-19 pandemic brought the entire travel industry to a complete standstill. Rather than sit back and wait out a pandemic that seems to linger on, Barbados launched an aggressive viral campaign to offer a 12-month “Welcome Stamp” to aspiring digital nomads. The results were astounding. Barbados doubled their original goal with more than 2,000 applicants within the first few months. The success of this campaign has caused a variety of other countries to quickly follow suit. The Cayman Islands now offers a 2-year visa and the Bahamas offers up to a 3-year visa. Montserrat, Anguilla, Curacao, Antigua, Barbuda, Bermuda, Dominica all have begun to offer renewable visas ranging from 12 to 18 months. All around the world countries are beginning to see the value and growth of the digital nomad traveler community. Thailand now offers a 4-year renewable visa. Croatia, Estonia, Dubai, Albania, Iceland, and Georgia all welcome remote workers without the persistent 30 to 90-day border runs. Costa Rica is also working to attract Digital Nomads. The “Law to Attract Workers and Remote Service Providers of an International Nature” is promoted by the deputy of the National Liberation Party (PLN), Carlos Ricardo Benavides. “Even in Japan, they mention us as a country that is preparing to receive digital nomads. The world is in competition for this tourism and Costa Rica has a great opportunity that it must take advantage of and reactivate its economy,” the deputy said. Costa Rica has a history of reluctantly allowing perpetual tourists, as long as these travelers don’t exceed the 90-day tourist visa. Thousands of digital nomads have spent a large part of the last few years going back and forth between Costa Rica and their home country, and others simply hop over to a neighboring country for an afternoon or other travel destination to stay compliant with Costa Rican law. If the new digital nomad-friendly law is enacted in Costa Rica, digital nomads will be able to avoid the expense of time and money to perform quarterly border runs. The law creates a new category of Estancia Visa. Digital nomads will have their driving privileges extended for the duration of their visa, be able to open bank savings accounts, and receive tax exemptions on electronic equipment required for their work. The attraction to become a digital nomad is high for tech-savvy travelers. It’s a different mindset than you would find with retirees. People are not always ready to invest their life savings into buying a property or a business to get residency. They may not be ready to commit to staying in one part of a country, or even the same part of the world for more than a year or two at a time. However, this law will make it easier for digital nomads to live and work, and likewise competitively increases the attraction of digital nomads to Costa Rica. “Costa Rica is an ideal location for digital nomads,” said John Scheman, founder of Grupo Do It, a company involved in tourism and focused on developing properties in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. “Costa Rica’s central location makes it easy to work in a time-zone similar to peers and clients in the US. and Canada. Likewise, digital nomads can fly directly into Guanacaste from Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Dallas, Houston, and Miami in 3 to 5 hours at a fraction of the cost of flying to a remote island, and then be on the beach or in the mountains well before sunset.” The reasons that people have for living this new geographic-freedom lifestyle vary. Many digital nomads may have launched a new chapter in their lives and they’re still waiting for the details to work out legally, financially, or otherwise before they commit to one place indefinitely. With the digital nomad community, if someone has the opportunity to work and make an income remotely while bringing cash and resources into a new local economy, then it’s no wonder that so many countries are seeing this as an entirely new and lucrative opportunity. Many of these digital nomad perpetual tourists may eventually become residents, or at the very least, encourage others to become tourists by showing all of their family, friends, and loved ones what is possible in a digital nomad-friendly country. Costa Rica now has the opportunity to capture this new and quickly emerging market by offering the best opportunity for digital nomads in the region for years to come, and quickly start the process of bringing Costa Rica’s prosperity back to pre-pandemic levels of growth Professional's
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