Are you planning to work remotely in a new location? Here’s my guide to finding the right accommodation for your stay!

I mostly use Booking.com and Airbnb to look for accommodations as they generally have the largest volume of places to stay in any given area. A stable WiFi connection is crucial for successful video calls, but most places don’t declare how they are connected.

In general, apartments always have the best connection as there is nobody else to share the bandwidth like there often is at ho(s)tels. Another positive side of apartments is that the modem is always nearby rather than three rooms down the corridor. That means you get to have your speedy cake and eat it too!

Do your due diligence by reading through reviews to get a sense of what to expect:

• Sort your reviews from newest to oldest. Sometimes a place with a bad connection has done a fix or an upgrade to its connectivity so negative reviews from 2 years ago are meaningless compared to more recent five-star reviews.

• Use the filter function for keywords like “WiFi”, “Internet” or “Speed”, they’ll get you relevant reviews quickly and reduce the time needed to read through everybody’s opinion. On Booking, I’ve noticed that an average score of 8 is a hard minimum for any acceptable internet connection.

Booking also has a nice feature where, with enough reviews, you can click on what people have said about the accommodation’s WiFi connection, which includes relevant keywords from different languages, even ones that don’t use our alphabet system but can be translated to English.

Mixed WiFi strength reviews usually indicate that modems are few and far between so you’ll need to ask for a room “with a strong connection” and hope for the best.

Lastly, I always give more weight to the opinions of people who might have stayed in a place for more than a week. If they enjoyed a month, and even rated their internet highly, you are more likely to succeed than listening to a person who stayed for one weekend enjoying Netflix and social media.

With these, you should get a pretty good idea of what to expect from your accommodation and consider if you might need a hotspot backup or find a nearby coworking space to ensure your meetings go well.

If you’re going to a cheap country like most Digital Nomads, your accommodation will probably lack any proper kitchen and you’ll want to eat out all day every day.

Working 8 hours a day, there isn’t THAT much time to move around looking for good food. Use Google Maps to see where you might find affordable food courts or food stalls. My ideal is a 15-minute walking radius to get things done ideally within one hour.

Blog posts are also a great resource to find the foodie capitals of your destination. Here’s an easy search prompt: [Destination name] Travel Guide Blog. For example, Kuala Lumpur Travel Guide Blog. Add filler words like Full, Complete, or phrases, like “Where to eat” to diversify your search results.

This kind of sucks as a user, but platforms do give out app-only discounts. I’ve saved a lot by making the final purchase via the application rather than on a desktop website.

If you start your research on the computer, some accommodations might suddenly become available within your price range. Remember to do a quick look at your favorite area for new places before checking out your shortlisted accommodation prices!

Bonus tip: platforms often collaborate with major airlines and other travel industry moves to grant extra loyalty program points when using their affiliate link. The prices are often much more expensive, making the affiliation rather pointless, but you might be lucky and find something worthwhile.

I’m a person who tends to explode his backpack’s contents all over the floor because I can’t find my favorite socks from a big pile of stuff. Having space to spread out, shelves to organize things, and even a cupboard to hide some bigger items, helps keep your sanity in place.

I sometimes leave things behind in accommodations, most recently my electric toothbrush charger. That happened in one of the smallest accommodations of a longer trip where I remember thinking when I first walked in “Well, it should be easy to take everything with me from here. There’s no place for anything to get lost.” Oh well…

Review scores differ on different platforms because they have different user bases. Google’s reviews tend to capture the general sentiment of a place quite well. I always do a final check on my shortlist of accommodations for congruent opinions (yes, the place is peaceful to sleep in) or details left unmentioned in other platforms (wait, there’s a chicken farm next door!?).

With these tips, you should hopefully find a place that best suits your needs without unwanted surprises. Happy travels!

PS. If you found this content helpful, I’d love to hear about it on LinkedIn – feel free to connect with me!