[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

Workations Are Dead — Return-to-Office Just Reinvented How We Take Time Off

The work-from-Bali fantasy is over, and honestly? Good riddance. The RTO crackdown killed the workation and accidentally invented something better: the short, brutal, fully-offline 'condensed escape.'

The workation trend is over RTO, and I’m here to dance on its grave a little.

You remember the fantasy. 2021, 2022. The laptop on the beach. The “I’ll just take a few calls from a hammock in Tulum and call it a quarter.” LinkedIn was wall-to-wall with people posting their “office for the day” — a MacBook precariously balanced near salt water, a coconut, a smug little caption about geographic freedom. And we all kind of bought it. Including me. I once tried to run a client presentation from a co-working space in Lisbon and the wifi died mid-sentence and I had to apologise to fourteen people while a man behind me made an espresso with the force of a thousand suns.

It was never as good as it looked. And now it’s basically dead. Because the office came back.

Once companies started counting badge swipes and mandating three, four, five days in the building, the whole premise collapsed. You cannot work from anywhere when “anywhere” has to be within commuting distance of a desk somebody’s checking you sat at. The work-from-Bali people either came home or quit. Mostly came home.

But here’s the part nobody expected. The death of the workation didn’t make us travel less. It made us travel better. Because the dirty secret of the workation was that it was a bad holiday AND a bad workday, glued together. You weren’t relaxed — you had Slack open. You weren’t productive — you were jetlagged and there was a beach right there. You paid for a trip and then spent it half-working, returning home somehow more tired than when you left. A genuinely cursed format.

So what replaced it. People I know — and me, increasingly — have moved to what I’ve started calling the condensed escape. Short. Sharp. Totally offline. Planned within an inch of its life.

The logic is: if I only get real time off in discrete chunks, I am going to make every hour of those chunks count, and I am NOT going to contaminate them with work. A long weekend in Copenhagen. Four days in the Atlas Mountains with no signal at all. A Thursday-to-Sunday in Naples eating my body weight in fried pizza. The trips got shorter and the intensity of the rest went way up.

And the planning changed. When you’ve got three days and they have to actually restore you, you don’t wing it. You don’t spend a morning paralysed in a hotel room scrolling for a brunch spot. You book the thing, you know the route, you protect the trip from your own indecision.

A few rules I’ve landed on, having ruined enough trips by staying half-online:

• Delete the work apps off your phone before you leave. Not mute. Delete. You can reinstall in 90 seconds when you’re back. The friction is the point — it stops the 7am “just a quick check” that ruins the whole day’s mood.
• Pick somewhere two to four hours’ travel, max. The condensed escape dies on travel days. A short hop means more trip, less transit.
• Plan the anchors, not the hours. One great dinner booked per night, one main thing per day. Leave the gaps loose. Over-planning is just work in a different outfit.
• Go somewhere with a forcing function for being present. Mountains with no signal. A spa town. A small island. Pick a place that makes disconnecting the path of least resistance instead of a daily act of willpower.
• Tell people you’re gone. An honest out-of-office that says “I will not be checking this” is doing real psychological work, for you and them.

There’s an economics angle here too that nobody talks about. The workation was, secretly, a way to feel like you were travelling without spending vacation days — you’d burn three weeks “working from” somewhere and only formally take two days off. It felt clever. It was actually a way of never fully stopping, dressed up as freedom. The condensed escape flips that. You spend the PTO, you protect it fiercely, and because the trip is short you can afford to make it good — a nicer hotel for three nights costs less than a mediocre one for two weeks, and you’re not paying for a fortnight of half-working misery. I spend more per day now and less per trip, and I come home actually wanting to be back at work, which is a sentence I genuinely never thought I’d write.

Is something lost? Sure. The romance of the idea — that we could all just untether and live anywhere — was lovely while it lasted. I miss believing it. But it was a story we told ourselves, and the reality was a soggy laptop and a guilt-soaked margarita.

The condensed escape is honest. It says: work is work, off is off, and the off part is going to be short and excellent and laptop-free. I come back from those trips actually rested now. The workation never once did that for me. Not once.

Stop trying to live everywhere a little. Go somewhere completely, for three days, with the laptop at home. That’s the real freedom.

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