The Dyrt, a popular app for camping information and booking, is reporting that 23.8 percent of campers say they worked remotely in 2022, which is identical to the report from the previous year.
“With return-to-the-office efforts across the country, one might have expected the work-from-campsite rate to decrease, but it stayed level,” says Kevin Long, CEO of The Dyrt. “Work from campsite is here to stay. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, and you can’t put a productive working camper back in the cubicle.”
Of the thousands of respondents who took part in the survey, 13.4 percent are categorized as avid campers, meaning they took more than 10 camping trips in 2022. That group was found to be nearly two times more likely to have worked from a campsite last year than other campers.
Vanlifers are certainly one of the main groups of people who take their work on the road. In fact, Long and founder Sarah Smith ran The Dyrt from their camper van for six months in the latter half of 2021 while crisscrossing the country.
“Remote work doesn’t have to be work from home,” Smith says. “As the leading resource and community for campers, we love it when a member of our fully remote team works from a campsite. It adds energy to our meetings when someone logs on from the side of a lake or the base of a mountain.”
Recent technological advances have made the work-from-campsite lifestyle even easier to attain. SpaceX’s satellite-based Starlink recently announced it can provide high-speed internet while a vehicle is in motion.
“I find increased productivity when working from a campsite,” says The Dyrt camper Jason Dunne of Livingston, Texas. “The novelty of designing modern websites with Starlink in the middle of nowhere with solar power may never wear off!”
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Glad that my days of working remotely are well-past. Now I work around the house or travel. 🙂 😎
Most of the work from campsite folks I meet are either self-employed or they hold jobs that supported remote work well before the COVID related WFH craze.
I worked remotely from a home office for over a decade while my spouse’s job restricted us to our geographic region. She retired prior to me (I was supplying health insurance), and the last two years of my W-2 employment we wintered from a campground. Other than recreating my office inside a tiny corner of the trailer and the battle to find reliable high-speed internet. Nothing changed.
And by nothing changed, I also mean my social life. My wife made multiple friends with fellow seasonal campers during those two years. I wasn’t able to build any different social life in the campground until I retired. I see the same thing with other work campers. They might as well live in suburbia. For the most part you only see them long enough to say hello.
Yes so true! I work off and on in my RV as needed, and working through the 3pm happy hour while listening to family and friends talking and laughing outside is not much fun. I’d almost rather be holed up in my office sometimes. But at least I am only part time work and find time to enjoy good things and people. I have met people who are really stuck inside their little cube 8-10 hours and that must suck.