I work out of an RV. Some weeks, that means a park in Florida with a pool and a happy hour schedule. Other weeks, it's meant Mexico, Canada, or Turks & Caicos, laptop open, trying to get a full workday in before I go be a tourist for a few hours. I've done this long enough now to notice a pattern: almost every destination I've visited is built for someone who stays a week and leaves. Almost none of them are built for someone who stays a month and works the whole time.
That's not a complaint. It's a genuinely useful thing for destination marketers to notice, because that second traveler already exists, already has money to spend, and is already showing up — whether or not anyone designed anything for them.
Here's something most people outside the RV world don't realize: RV parks aren't one thing. There are leisure parks built for a weekend getaway crowd, seasonal parks full of the same families returning every winter, and residential parks where people genuinely live long-term. Each one has its own culture, and not all of them are set up for someone who needs to be on video calls at 10am on a Tuesday.
Wifi is the single biggest variable across all of them, and it's not close. Advertised "high-speed internet" at a park can mean anything from genuinely solid to unusable the moment three other campers stream something. I've stopped trusting the marketing copy entirely — I bring Starlink with me wherever I go, because I've learned the hard way that "we have wifi" and "you can reliably work here" are two different claims.
The lesson for destinations isn't "install better wifi," though that helps. It's that connectivity is table stakes, not a nice-to-have, for an entire category of visitor you may already be attracting without realizing it.
Some of the best experiences I've had on the road weren't the marquee attractions — they were the small, human things that made me think, "I could actually live here for a while."
Mexico does this better than almost anywhere I've been. It's the kindness of the people, the ease of finding genuinely great fresh food, street tacos worth planning your day around, and beaches you don't have to fight a crowd for. None of that is a campaign — it's just how people there make you feel welcome, and it's exactly the feeling that turns a visitor into someone who extends their stay.
Canada sells itself differently, and just as effectively: stunning vistas practically everywhere, and nature experiences that are hard to overstate. That's a different kind of pull — less "I want to belong here" and more "I want my daily life to include this view for a while" — but it's just as real a reason to stay longer than a typical vacation.
Turks & Caicos is a good example of the gap between comfort and fit. The connectivity was decent, the resorts genuinely comfortable and luxurious — but be prepared to be the only person with a laptop open at a café or restaurant. The infrastructure for a longer work stay is in place. The surrounding culture isn't quite built around it yet. You can feel like a guest who's doing something slightly unusual, rather than someone the destination expected and planned for.
The destinations that get this right tend to do one small, unglamorous thing: they add a page to their website that actually speaks to someone considering working remotely while visiting. That still surprises me every time I find one, because it's rare — and because it costs a destination almost nothing to create, while signaling something a leisure-only visitor page never will: "we thought about you specifically."
The mistake most destinations make isn't a lack of amenities. It's a lack of imagination about who's already showing up. Marketing, website copy, and even accommodation strategy tend to be built entirely around the leisure visitor — someone coming for a fixed number of days to see and do things, then leave. That's a fine visitor to plan for. It's just not the only one. A lot of destinations haven't asked themselves the second question: why might someone want to live here, even just for a few weeks, while they keep working?
This isn't just a marketing gap — it's a workforce one. Frontline staff, hospitality partners, and destination marketing teams generally aren't trained to recognize this visitor type or to serve them well, because no one has ever framed it as a distinct segment worth designing for. That's a training and awareness problem before it's a website problem, and it's exactly the kind of blind spot a good workshop or team conversation can close quickly once someone names it out loud.
Pull up your destination's website and look at it the way a remote worker would, not a leisure traveler. Is there any where that tells them where the reliable connectivity actually is? Is there a single page acknowledging that someone might want to stay and work for a while, not just visit? Ask your accommodation partners how many longer-stay bookings they're already getting from people who never identified themselves as "digital nomads" on the way in.
If the answer is "we don't really know," that's not evidence the segment isn't there. It's evidence nobody's looked yet.