Working remotely while travelling: a practical setup guide

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It’s 9:47am in Lisbon and the wifi at Copenhagen Coffee Lab on Rua do Poço dos Negros has just dropped for the third time this morning. Outside, the 28 tram grinds up the hill past Jardim de São Bento, and a laptop screen freezes mid-video-call while someone mutters an apology to a colleague seven time zones away in Sydney. This is the unglamorous truth of working remotely while travelling: it is rarely the beach-with-a-laptop photograph. It is a spreadsheet of backup plans, a second SIM card, and knowing exactly which café has a generator when the power grid in Ubud has one of its regular afternoon outages.

None of that means it doesn’t work. It means it works when you plan for the boring parts before you plan for the exciting ones. This guide covers what actually needs sorting before you leave, how to choose a base that won’t sabotage your working hours, and what the reality looks like once you’re there.

The gear that actually matters

Most remote work packing lists are bloated with gadgets nobody needs. The essentials are narrower than people assume:

• A universal travel adapter with surge protection — not the cheap ones sold at airport kiosks, which fail within weeks. Look for one rated for your laptop’s wattage.
• An unlocked phone that accepts local SIMs or eSIMs. This matters more than any other single item on this list.
• A mechanical keyboard or lightweight external keyboard if you’re typing for six-plus hours a day on a laptop that wasn’t designed for it — wrist strain from hunching over a MacBook in a hostel bed is a genuine, common injury among long-term remote workers.
• A portable hotspot device or a phone that tethers reliably. Café wifi fails. It fails in Lisbon, it fails in Chiang Mai, it fails everywhere, and your backup plan needs to not depend on the same network.
• Noise-cancelling headphones — for calls, and for sanity when the apartment above you is having its floors redone at 8am, which it will be, eventually, everywhere.

Skip the standing desk converter, the second monitor (unless you’re settling somewhere for months), and the elaborate cable organiser system. Weight matters more than most people admit until they’re carrying it up four flights of stairs in a building with no lift, which is most buildings in old European cities.

Choosing a base: it’s not just about the wifi

The mistake people make is choosing a destination based on Instagram appeal and researching the internet speed after they’ve already booked the apartment. Do it the other way round. Check connectivity data through something like the Speedtest Global Index, which ranks median fixed broadband and mobile speeds by country — it won’t tell you about that one specific building, but it tells you whether you’re gambling in a country with generally strong infrastructure or a genuinely patchy one.

Time zone alignment with your team or clients matters more than almost anything else. A location six hours removed from your usual working hours will quietly wreck your sleep within a fortnight, however good the coffee is.

Lisbon and Tbilisi are worth particular attention for anyone whose work depends on European business hours — both sit close enough to Central European Time that a normal working day doesn’t require setting an alarm for 5am. If Portugal appeals, it’s worth reading further on what exists beyond Lisbon itself, since smaller towns like Coimbra and Tavira offer lower costs and a slower pace without sacrificing much in connectivity.

Connectivity: assume the wifi will fail

Every remote worker who has done this for more than a few months has a story about a video call that collapsed at the worst possible moment. The fix isn’t better hope. It’s redundancy.

Buy a local SIM or eSIM on arrival rather than relying on your home carrier’s roaming rates, which are punishing almost everywhere outside the EU. Airalo and Holafly are widely used eSIM providers that let you buy data packages before you land, which means you have a working hotspot the moment you step off the plane rather than wandering an arrivals hall looking for a SIM kiosk with a queue.

For anything client-facing or deadline-critical, treat the café wifi as your backup and your phone’s hotspot as your primary — cafés are wonderful for atmosphere and terrible for guaranteed uptime. Coworking spaces solve this more reliably: Selina and Second Home have locations across Lisbon, Mexico City, and Bali with dedicated fibre lines and backup generators, and the day-pass rates (typically $10–20) are worth it purely for the insurance policy, never mind the desk.

The visa question, honestly

This is the part people skip past and then get stung by. Working on a tourist visa is technically a legal grey area in most countries — you’re not employed locally, you’re not taking a local job, but immigration officials don’t always see it that way, and enforcement varies wildly and changes without warning.

Countries have started building formal pathways for this. Portugal’s D8 visa is aimed specifically at remote workers and freelancers with income above a set threshold, and it’s a genuine path to residency, not just a stay extension — details and requirements are handled through Portugal’s immigration authority and change periodically, so check current figures directly rather than trusting a blog post’s numbers. Thailand’s Destination Thailand Visa, introduced more recently, allows longer stays specifically for remote workers rather than forcing the old cycle of visa runs to Laos or Cambodia every 30 days. Georgia remains one of the most straightforward: many nationalities get a full year visa-free, no sponsor, no minimum income proof required at entry.

Whatever the destination, check current entry requirements against your government’s official travel advisory before booking anything non-refundable — the US State Department’s travel advisories page and its UK and Australian equivalents are updated more reliably than most third-party visa blogs, including this one.

Timezone management: the unglamorous skill nobody teaches

The people who make working remotely while travelling sustainable long-term aren’t the ones with the best apartments — they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to protect a consistent sleep schedule against wildly shifting time zones. A few things that actually help:

• Anchor your working hours to your team’s core overlap window, even if that means working 2pm–10pm locally rather than 9-to-5, and structure sightseeing around the mornings instead.
• Use a world clock app with your key colleagues pinned, not mental arithmetic — the 3am Slack message sent by mistake because you miscounted the offset is a rite of passage everyone would rather skip.
• If you’re moving between bases every few weeks, favour ones within two to three hours of each other rather than swinging from Bangkok to Buenos Aires and back, which will wreck a sleep schedule far faster than jet lag from a single long flight.

Slow travel — staying in one place for a month or more rather than city-hopping every few days — solves most of this by default, and it’s worth reading about why certain European cities suit this pace particularly well, since the calculation for a remote worker is different from the calculation for someone on a two-week holiday. Fewer arrivals and departures means fewer days lost to jet lag, hunting for a new SIM card, and figuring out where the reliable coffee is.

Finding a workspace that isn’t a hostel common room

Working from a hostel bed is possible for about four days before it stops being charming. A few reliable patterns across popular remote work destinations:

Coworking spaces cluster in predictable neighbourhoods: Príncipe Real and Santos in Lisbon, Nimman in Chiang Mai, Roma Norte in Mexico City, Old Town (Sololaki) in Tbilisi. These areas develop their own infrastructure of cafés with actual desk space, faster wifi, and staff who don’t mind someone nursing one flat white for four hours, because half their customers are doing exactly that.

Monthly coworking memberships run roughly $80–150 in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, and $150–250 in Western Europe or Mexico City — cheaper than a single week of a hot-desk membership back home, in most cases. Punch Space and CAMP in Chiang Mai, Second Home in Lisbon, and Fabrika in Tbilisi are all established, well-reviewed options with the fibre connections that actual remote work requires.

Health insurance and banking — the least exciting, most necessary part

Standard travel insurance often excludes coverage for extended stays or for working while abroad — read the policy wording, not just the marketing page. SafetyWing’s Nomad Insurance was built specifically for this gap and is widely used among long-term remote workers, though it’s worth comparing against a standard international health policy if you have pre-existing conditions it might not cover well.

For banking, a Wise or Revolut multi-currency account solves most of the friction of getting paid in one currency and spending in another, avoiding the punishing conversion fees that traditional banks quietly apply. Keep at least one physical backup card from a different provider — cards get frozen by fraud detection systems more often when used across multiple countries in quick succession, usually at the worst possible moment, like paying for a coworking membership at 8am before a client call.

The Bottom Line

• Redundancy beats optimism. Two SIM cards, two payment cards, and a hotspot as backup to café wifi will save more working days than any amount of destination research.
• Time zone overlap should decide your base before aesthetics do. A beautiful apartment in a place six hours removed from your team’s working hours becomes a liability within two weeks.
• Check visa rules against official government sources, not travel blogs — including this one — since requirements shift and the consequences of getting it wrong range from a fine to a re-entry ban.
• Slower is genuinely easier. Staying somewhere for six to eight weeks rather than city-hopping every few days removes most of the logistical friction that makes remote work while travelling exhausting rather than sustainable.
• The unglamorous infrastructure — coworking memberships, insurance, a reliable bank setup — is what actually makes this work long-term, far more than the destination itself.

Keep reading: Read the honest take on digital nomad life in Chiang Mai