EP068 - How companies benefit from home swaps for their remote workers with Stephen Dooley at Roamr
About the episode
This episode focuses on how remote workers can swap their homes with each other and how companies can benefit from home swapping within their teams. We will explore remote workers' opportunities when finding accommodation and how companies build a better remote culture by letting employees work from anywhere. To discuss this, we invited Stephen Dooley from Roamr.
About the guest
Stephen is the founder and CEO of Roamr - an employee house swap and socialization platform for distributed teams. We’re enabling forward-thinking companies to offer mobility as a perk.
Prior to Roamr, I was doing PhD research into how companies like Airbnb and Uber created trust and adoption. I was also working as the Programme Director in the Business Faculty in an Irish 3rd-level institution.
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Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. Today we will discuss a very important topic. I think I won't be so controversial to say that work and life balance never really existed anyway, but it certainly became a little bit more fluid since the pandemic and how people started on a mass scale, working remotely and working distributed teams. It's interesting to see how the hospitality industry shifted from a booking com perspective to team retreats, corporate retreats. We already had so many guests and topics discussing this whole all team retreats and why they are important. But we had a very few guests and very few people discussing how people can find long term solutions for rents and sharing their flats and apartments and accommodation from a B2B perspective. It's now that people and teams are working together distributively with distributed companies, flat sharing is like also a B2B offering. And for today we will have a discussion with Stephen Dooley from Ireland. Welcome, Stephen.
Yeah, super. Thanks for having me. And it's a very accurate summary of what it is we were kind of looking at ourselves and what it is we're trying to do. It's to try to be the bridge in between that gap of something that might have previously been very consumer driven and now realizing that there is an opportunity for that to be brought at the end at the corporate level, that was the backdrop of what I was doing before Roamer, really. I was looking, I was doing sort of PhD research looking at companies like Uber and Airbnb. And I like the summary of that I always give is that my parents gave me two lessons in life. Don't get in the car with a stranger and don't answer the door to a stranger. They just blew it to smithereens, right? So they really changed society's perspective on that line and they blurred some of the historical lessons we had. And I think we could potentially look at the next layer of that happening now where the line being blurred is moving something a little bit more corporate than might have been consumer driven before.
Totally. Let's start from your point of view because it is unique it's important and it's inherently you. Precall you mentioned that right now you are in Spain, you're originally from Ireland and you're building a global company anyway and you started as a PhD student and now you're founding your own company. Tell me the whole story. It's super interesting to hear.
Okay, yeah the Roamer journey was probably partly due to having a bit of an insight into the dynamics of that marketing from the backdrop of studying the PhD, so I was doing that in Cork. I was also lecturing at the time and then I became a program director in the business school in Griffith College and in computer faculty as well. So it was a very academic background, and it was through COVID, I had the story that I think so many other people in the world there's a temporary relocation, or at least we thought it would be temporary. We said we moved down to West Cork, very rural, very beautiful part of the world. We thought it'd be a three month hiatus because we could both work remotely and that was two and a half years ago. So that's our base, which we spend the majority of our time in, but we're leveraging some of the flexibility, the location flexibility, I think, that these, the new opportunity offers. At the moment, out in Spain, during workation was in Paris last weekend for some of the rugby games, and I'm going to Paris again next weekend, but... The beauty of the flexibility to be able to work on any given day, it means that we've actually found a more cost effective way to do that trip, like we can now have our flights on a Thursday and work the Friday instead of the premium cost of flight on Friday, and you can bed down for a little bit longer and properly enjoy city rather than rushing around trying to cram it all into a three day long weekend. The backdrop I suppose, of I think we saw, I think it was kicked on by maybe a problem that we experienced in previous jobs. I say we, myself and my girlfriend, Jessica. But the problem that I experienced when I was in academia, when I was working, we were fully remote. We were teaching on zoom all the time. And then between semesters, there was this kind of month long window when students are doing exams and doing corrections from anywhere in the world. We wanted to decide, let's do that. So let's go to Marseilles was where we had picked at the time. And then we went on to Airbnb. We were looking at the price of an Airbnb for a month and we got slapped in the face very quickly. So I think that was the call to action, there has to be a better way. And actually I had a kind of conversation with a friend at the time and he had the exact same problem. So that was the problem I think that we spotted. And the next six months probably began looking at, hey is this problem happening on mass with employees across the world, but also trying to understand how are the employers thinking about this, what's an employer challenge and seeing, can we bridge the gap, I think, between the two.
And there is a, yes, and there are 2 motivations, right? So it's like a personal 1 and also corporate 1. And I think the interesting part at least within this industry that you're active in for most of the B2C like consumer driven problems, there are already solutions or there are solutions which are good or bad, but there are solutions, there are home exchanges available for everyone where you don't need to actually pay but like you just exchange homes with others. And there are, personal ones like groups, Facebook groups, whatever you can do, whatever that that's comfortable with you. But when you move that whole problem arc into the corporates, there is employee engagement employee satisfaction less churn, people are more driven to experience more locations, more experiences. There is that aspect. And if you do have a either like a larger team I don't know, 50 plus or something or you are willing to collaborate with other teams as well to share the flats, that's where actually insane, magic can happen.
Yeah. You've hit the nail on the head and funny that you started with the the existing kind of solutions that are out there, the consumer driven solutions. That's where I started too. It wasn't, Hey, I want to go abroad. I better build a company to do it. It was okay, how can I do this? And I went out there and I looked into the market and there are home swap sites that are out there. I couldn't use any of them. Maybe you have. I'm sure many of your listeners had success with it. But for me, there was a couple of issues. One was there was no work centricity, right? So it didn't, and actually the reason that my co founder Jason and I immediately clicked was he was like, I fully understand this problem. So his version of the problem was even though the price tag was hefty. Himself and his wife were willing to save up for a little bit of time. And then he was saying, Hey, let's go and do a month in Italy. But when push comes to shove, there's a little bit of too much anxiety around the workstation. When you're going for an extended period, you need to know, Hey, have I got reliable wifi? Is there a desk there? Maybe you are someone who needs a dual monitor and that's how you work best. Maybe you need to verify that there's a confidential meeting room. Let's say there's a team going out there. Is everybody able to have a separate call and not be overheard and everything? So there's this whole work centricity piece that I didn't think any of the solutions had satisfied, and that includes Airbnb and they'll move in that direction. And now they're seeing, dedicated workspace and we've built in wifi validation and things like that. But that was one of the main pieces. There was no work centricity. And then the other was you're prompted to pay membership up front. You don't know how many people in this network want to come to West Cork and how many swaps am I going to get? So you can't maybe rationalize that price divided by a number of swaps. So they were the kind of two major challenges for me. And I ultimately wasn't able to go and do and find a house swap as a result. So that was where the B2B opportunity, it seemed to rise and you've hit all the reasons for it as well. Can we position this as a way to show the workforce that, Hey, we are an employee first company. We want to provide flexibility. When we used to think about flexibility, if you look at the business books, I don't know if they've even updated them yet, but it used to say in the section on flexibility in the workplace, it was like flexi time, right? So the example is, Hey, you can drop your kids to school and then come to work a half an hour later. And this was like, revolutionary. Now when we look at flexibility, it is a whole different piece, right? There's two brackets of time and location. And even under time, you have like people talking about like your circadian rhythm, I work best between these hours and having like core hours and time zones and all of that piece and async, like all of that stuff is under time. And then under location where we're playing is around how do we mobilize the workforce? How do we offer mobility as a part? And I think the companies that are doing that really are the ones that are going to. Continue to win in the next couple of years.
Sorry, but I got like highly triggered and I think it's important to share as well because how I personally operated in the last, I don't know, two years three during the pandemic, especially. So I'm working remotely since 2014. So it's not really new, but I never did the digital nomadic stuff. So I never perpetually traveled all the time. I usually traveled for one or two weeks, which were all travel only. So not work and travel. I traveled a lot, but traveled for one or two weeks. If you have one or two weeks and work is not included in there, it's easy to solve. It's easy to solve, booking or Airbnb or whatever you have. Or you're price conscious, you can easily solve with that in home exchanges whatever, because there are solutions for that now. When you actually do that with work and for longer periods of time slow traveling, that's where the problems arise. So it will either cost you like an insane amount of money through, like seriously I know Airbnb and Booking and whatever they actually, I think only Airbnb, they offer you monthly discounts for longer stays. But even with that, it's insane. Why? Because most of those houses and homes and flats and apartments, they are designed for commercial use. And when you and you would say that most of the time you can swap the homes with individuals, right? Because home exchange and whatever but people only want to share home or sorry swap homes for a couple of days maybe a week, maybe two weeks, but that's a stretching, so It's really hard all in all, just to sum it up. It's insanely hard as an individual, even if I don't participate in any kind of company B2B exchanges that you did you offer, for example as an individual, it's insanely hard to find a great location with at least a month of stay, a longer stay and which is a great location with a long stay. And also it's great for work because the great for work usually ends with, yeah, we have wifi and there is a table and pretty much that's it. I think the question is why, and this is, this should be the question why should the employers, the companies care about this need from the personal level, from the individuals, from their team members, why it's a corporate question? Why it can be a corporate question?
I think the easy answer to that is you lose if you don't because of the dynamics that play in the market currently. So I was lecturing in economics, right? And there's an economics theory called the lemons theory. For the listeners, it's usually applied to the used car market, right? So they say if you're in the market to buy a car and you're looking at two, I don't know, BMWs and one of them is priced as 5, 000 euro, the other is priced as 10, 000 euro. As the buyer, you maybe don't have the same knowledge as the seller, right? Asymmetric information. So what most of the buyers do is they price in that uncertainty and they pick in the middle. If a peach is 10 and a lemon is 5. Then I'm willing to pay 7 and a half. And what happening in the market then is all of the people who own the peaches, the 10, 000 euro cars, they're not going to be willing to sell them for 7 and a half thousand euro. So they're just going to leave the market. So you have this concept where the market gets flooded with lemons, right? And I sat with this for a while and I looked and I thought about the labor market and I said, it's the same thing, right? Realistically, the best contributors, right? Your best people are the ones who demand the most because they know they're worth it. They know they contribute and they can ask for whether that's an increase in salary, whether that's more remote work, whether that's, I want to relocate and move somewhere else. You're seeing companies having to offer that greater flexibility to the key contributors in the business. So if you as a company aren't acknowledging that. Then you're not going to be able to retain that staff for the long haul. I think there's companies doing really good things. They're trying, they're moving in that direction. You're seeing so many companies rolling out these work from anywhere schemes. And I have a problem with the terminology on it, actually, because work from anywhere, some people think, hey, I can relocate permanently to a new country. There's solutions for that, for sure. You, the EO are hiring, but I like we're like a work temporary one. It's the more one that I'm talking about. So these 30 day policies, 60 day policies, 90 days in some cases, they are a no brainer. I think that should be every company who wants to retain their staff should be rolling them out, especially if you're applying a hybrid model, you have people bound to the location as a result of your hybrid model. So you're actually removing one of the greatest flexibilities of a sort of remote model.
And I, by the way we are always, most of the time especially during this, especially on this show and like within our space of like remote or distributed work and whatever, we usually talk about companies who are remote first, right? So when they are a hundred percent distributed, but these companies are they usually have a hundred, maybe 200 people on staff or even less. I think this whole model is a kicker for large enterprises. So if you have a thousand people and you are already doing hybrid work anyway why not offer a month of I wouldn't say paid time off, but more like a I wouldn't even know how to call that. It's not a workation or maybe a workation, an individual workation. That would be the best to call it. And employees can sign up, and they can sign up that, that yes, their houses are all are also available for other employees and other employees can switch homes with their existing employees in different spaces. So I think that would be a great solution. Now, for example, a person, I'm solving that issue individually. I think it would be amazing to solve on a bigger scale. How the model should work for you for example in terms of companies and what can be the biggest benefit for a company aside from the fact that they are supporting flexibility?
You've alluded to it a little bit, right? In that the way that it would work would be it does depend on the size of the company. So there'd be two versions of it. One could be this massive global company multinationals, Dell, Microsoft, Google, those style companies. In isolation, they have enough people within their network for that swap network to survive. So they would have maybe the preference for a kind of bespoke private network where it would be Dell to Dell employees swapping, Dell to Dell employees meeting up in different locations. Where I think the appetite is actually in the market more so now is probably with the smaller companies that you mentioned. Hey, we've got a remote first model. We want to give the ability to people to choose, where they are and work remote. And that's great, but we do need people together. We do need to have meetups. We do need the team bonding to happen to retain culture and even sometimes create culture if it's very early. So we think that a better model then is to pull those companies together. So let's say you have 50 to 500 employees and slightly above is fine too. But let's say you're in that startup sort of phase. Putting you in a with other trusted approved companies so that the supply is enough within the home side of the platform means that you can actually give Something to distinguish yourself from the Googles and the Microsofts of this world. You're not going to beat them on salary most likely So what you've got to do is you've got to drive a greater purpose of work a greater sense of belonging in the workplace greater flexibility greater perks and more unique offerings that they don't have to entice people away and companies are doing it and they're doing it really well. There's some companies have had Slack channels where they've had home swaps happening. Some of them closed them down. I won't drop names because they were waiting for like liability and stuff to come at them, but they do. They're acknowledging, Hey, this is an opportunity for remote work, but there's no technological solution. There's an insurance element you know, What happens if someone spills wine on the couch and how do we solve for that? So Roamer is housing all of that liability, all of that conflict resolution. Like you said, these things have been solved before Airbnb and booking. com have paved the way for the standards. We're just now bringing this into a corporate level. So we're following the same sort of solutions as they are, but we pull them together. If you're a smaller company, you can swap intercompany and then the company's choose. We have a whole second side around employee engagement where you'd be able to see who in your organization is in Budapest or is in Italy when you get there. And it'd be great to say, Hey, I actually met Stephen at the conference last year, and he also likes cycling. So when we're both in Rome at the same time, why not get out of the, behind the Zoom meeting and go for a cycle or run or walk through some museums. So bringing a little bit of a technological solution and just a bit of visibility to, Hey where's everybody at? What do they like? How do we meet up in person? Maybe supplementing those annual retreats with these kind of micro moments and meetups across the year because I've got a bunch of people retreats as well.
Of course, I think it would be super important to see or interesting to see how it can work if companies are matched together in one single location as well. That's like another area where this whole model can improve. But I think we can learn a lot from the original, like the OGs of this whole thing, the digital nomads. So they usually, like it's a thing that they do for like last 10, 20 years that they go to these like co-living locations they are solopreneurs, freelancers, whatever. Or they were most of the time now they are employees and team members with other companies and within that co living location, they learn from each other a lot. It's not a designated and designed as a bootcamp but it is a bootcamp because people are together and it's all organic and it's all happening organically. I think it's super important to see how these more, even more transparent companies are coming and willing to come together into one location and learn from each other. I think we are still in the same boat again these companies again they can learn a lot from each other which they can, their employees can use to grow their own companies where they are working at.
Yeah, it'll be so interesting to see how the engagement and the map side of it plays out because the first thing is like how I could see something happening is, hey, let's get the sales team down to Lisbon for a week. Let's get a couple of places on Rome or maybe one place with a big kitchen that we could sit and kind of co work and you get six, six of the team down there. They're sharing the same space. They're going out for meal and dinner. And the culture that drives from that is. Fantastic. But also on an individual level, right? Let's say somebody is based in Lisbon, right? And you've got six people from the team coming through and you haven't been able to move around because, maybe you're a carer, your family and whatever other reasons you're fine for a period of time. It would be great for you to be able to share hobbies with some of the people that are passing through your city. So being able to go onto the map throwing it forward in time so that you can plan, Hey, I know I'm going to be in Italy next month. Who's around and arranging some of the activities in advance. From a HR perspective, what we've tried to be able to do is say, Hey, how do we give the tools to the employee experience people in the HR teams to be able to identify opportunities to get people to meet up in person? So what we can do now is you can go onto the map and you can throw it forward in time and say, Hey, I see there's a cluster of people in London next week. And, we've rented kayaks for you guys to go and have a bit of fun in the evening time and get out into the real world kind of thing. So to try to just give a little cost effective solution is the important part, right? Retreats are crazy expensive if you're going through macro downturn and uncertainty going forward, you need to find out, Hey, we still need to get people together, but maybe we can't afford the big retreat this year. How do we find a punchy cost effective solution? And I think grassroots meetups part of the solution to that I also think they should supplement the retreats too. The retreat energy is amazing for the couple of weeks that it goes on for, but roll on another two weeks and it's back to what it was. It's people maybe working remotely, maybe meeting the odd coworker here and there, but I think there needs to be a conscious effort along with that. We wanted to retain the key piece for us was how do we make this free for the employee? Because that was a core problem, wasn't it? It was like, how did the employees get to go for a month in Marseille? How did we go there? It was 3000 euro. So we've adopted a SaaS model where employers would pay us what we think is a modest fee and it is a modest fee. And then they would have all of their workforce permission, unlimited swaps, unlimited moving around, unlimited meetups, whatever usage you want to derive from that.
Do you think that this should be connected to some sort of like a handholding support service style as well? Because I wouldn't like shelf it into like you're an Airbnb for remote workers because it's so much more than that. But when you are touching employee engagement, satisfaction, and all the like people operations set of stuff, immediately starts screaming for some sort of like services as well connected to that. Do you think it should be, I don't know a platform like yours job to do? Or just externals or I don't know, like extra offers as well, aside from the very bare bone, basic infrastructure.
No brilliant question. So there's a few different ways that we've thought about it. And one of them is when you have an employee experience officer, a HR officer, right? The HR teams traditionally had this unfortunate perception of being the police, right? People used to not enjoy getting an email from HR. And then COVID gave the HR teams the opportunity to say, Hey, actually, we're so much more. We enable the best parts of our people's lives. So what we've said is let's give the tooling to them if they want that, right? Now, it maybe requires a little bit of work on their side to be able to go onto the map and see where people are going to be. Drop in a pin and create an event and book a table at the restaurant if that's what they like. Of course, we can concierge that, right? And we can have customer success. Do that on your behalf, it's going to be a little bit more expensive than the original fee, but depending on whether you want to be responsible for those things, you know, maybe the team a little better and we can work alongside you to figure out what the best route is, but also it stems from like a desire to actually give those tools to the individual. I sat in a room with one of one of my mentors, John Reardon, and we had a kind of, there was a group, there was a remote worker meetup with Grow Remote in Ireland. And he said, he looked around the room and he's I know that there's three people in this room who are all interested in cycling. You all live within 10 kilometers of one another, and you've never got out on the bike. And I in the back of my head, I was going, I already have it pretty John. We know where we're going with this. But what, if you dive deeper on it. The retention that you have from having one friend in the workplace. There's different reports that say you're 70% to 10 x more likely to stay for a year. The way that we make connections with people, even brilliant stuff there recently from Raj Chowdry with Swoop and Flex Index and Rob Sato. They did a conversation around the study they did on Zapier's retreat. What they found was people, even when they get in person, they're more likely to hang out with people who are demographically similar to them. That trumps up the problem as well. You want diversity and you want ideas mixing. But if we're trying to initially form bonds in an organization, giving people just the transparency on interests hey, you also like kayaking, you also running, you also like gaming, whatever it might be. It gives you that spark to say, now we know when we have the conversation in person, we're going to have stuff to talk about. And that's where the platform can perform. So you can do peer to peer where the event is created by you identifying things you have in common. And we even identify the avatars based on a ring around them to say, Hey, you've got stuff in common with this person. So it can be one to one. It can be driven by the HR teams or community managers, or it can be concierged by us.
Perfect. By the way, just to reflect on that on the front side I think Gallup has a I wouldn't say like the industry average or the North star for all of the employee engagement service but they have seven questions there. And I think one of the questions it's, they are replicating the survey every year. And one of the questions is, do you have any for any friend at work? And that's super important for bond, team bonds and team connection. Let's discuss a little bit about the, again, to make this whole episode a little bit more personal. But again I totally resonate with the whole problem. I think it's important to discuss how someone can make their home swappable, right? Because that's super important because I think there are like three stages. You have a home, which is your home. All your shit is there. All your personal stuff is there. All your memorabilia and your special little whatever it is there. Which it would be broken it wouldn't be a financial cost in terms of like legally. But you will be super mad about that because it means a lot to you. All of your intrinsic stuff is there. Plus the home is organized in a way that You know, you are living in the home. And if it's not, these are the not swappable homes, I think, and there are the other end of the spectrum where the home is actually designed a hundred percent as an Airbnb, it's totally for commercial use and they are usually are an Airbnb as as well. But I think there's a middle ground between the two and those are the swappable homes. Those are the homes for a home exchange. Those are the homes for a longer stay where you feel confident that whoever stays in your home for a long period of time yeah, they might break a light bulb or whatever, but that's normal. You would break the light bulb anyway, because you're living there on, for a longer period, because that's your home. But nothing will get hurt. And I think I personally, I address that issue with a minimalistic home, so I don't have too much stuff. You cannot really break too many things here. And I think it's important to educate the people as well, the individuals, on how to make sure that their homes are swappable. Do you have that issue or that problem or I don't know.
Yeah it's so interesting because this was the backdrop, right? This is what I was looking at how did Airbnb create the trust that they did and like they didn't know because they've really had a longstanding perceptions to overcome. We still have some of them to overcome for sure. One of the first things to do is you can create the trust between the two people, or you can create the trust as a foundation of the platform itself. The first simple version is, Hey, there's insurance here. Okay. So if God forbid, something happened. You're covered. Okay. And that's the first starting point of trust. And the next one is, hey, it's in a trusted network. So if you're working for the same company as me, there is that element of tribal trust, right? Your tribe is my tribe. We're both bound by the same mission. I'm in your home while you're in my home. There's an extra layer of let's look after one another. I think the third one, which is something that, that is new in this context is there's now a professional element to the platform. Whereas previously there wasn't right and it might have been people are going on a fun weekend to Budapest and they're going to stay in the Airbnb and that leans itself to behavior that may not always be safest for the home, right, what we're getting at there is there's a different reason why people would use Roamer, right? It's a professional network, people are trying to balance having amazing life experiences and cool travel experiences with career progression, right? Historically speaking, and I've seen so many of my friends, a load of Irish people are in Australia at the moment and more and more keep going. What they're doing is they're opting out of the workforce temporarily, in many cases. And they're going, having a year of intensive travel. And that's my travel over in Dublin. I've also got friends who said, I don't actually want to travel for six months in a row. It's way too intense. And I don't want to live out of a suitcase and a bag for six months and I want to have an ability to go to my nephew's birthday and I want to have life events back home. I want to keep my job is also a huge part of that. So that's what we're doing is, hey, it doesn't have to be this fully intensive kind of travel environment. You can go over for a month. You can even take a week's holiday at the start, work for two and a half weeks, take a Friday here and there and use your annual leave days effectively. But it is centered around this sort of professional professional setup. So that I think is how we're leading towards trust. I think people within the network like we would like a Roamer to be someone that means something. It means, you are driven about your career. You want to be productive when you're on the move, but you do want to have an enjoyment of seeing what life has to offer. And I think we're trying to find our way into that that mission. And I hope that resonates with the users as well.
Totally. Totally. I think what you are doing and how you're thinking about it is very forward thinking in terms of this is a I wouldn't say it's a totally new market, but the solution is like a new answer to a pretty new problem. So I think because of that, I usually don't ask this question at the end, but I think for you it's mandatory to ask. Sorry about that. How do you see the future for distributed work? What do you think the future of work will be look like?
Yeah, no, super question. I think the overarching view I have is more flexible working model, whatever that is for your organization whether you have the desire to have people on site for a period of time, I still think that the companies that decide to have people location bound will have to find a way of offering additional location flexibility. I think that's the only way. You're seeing companies that are built from 2011 onwards. It's kind of Nick Bloom and Flex Index are saying that 93% of those companies are offering location flexibility, which is just Yes. A staggeringly high score. So roll those companies forward another 10 years and they're the powerhouses in the world, and guiding those. I think it's more flexible. We're wavering out here now at a 50% occupancy rate, and you have a kind of return to office mandate and conversations around, if unemployment goes up and goes down, you now have a global talent market. And people will be constantly trying to compete with the big dogs. So they will constantly offer something that the big dogs don't until they bow and acknowledge, okay, we're going to have to close the gap here. Imagine you're one of the large companies who's done it back to office or else hybrid, whatever it is. And you're seeing this flow of talent to this kind of small startup in Stockholm. And you're saying, why did it, why have we lost three or four people to this company? And you go and you browse through what is it that they have that we don't. And eventually you'll say, ah, here's maybe it's a work from anywhere policy. Maybe it's a home office site. Maybe it's a travel budget, whatever it is. You say maybe that's the thing that we need to add into our offering. And I think you'll have this convergence of perks and benefits to a way better standard and above what it was 10 years ago. The employees are definitely benefiting from all of this for sure. Everybody sees what's going out on social media. LinkedIn is becoming a sort of way of you elaborating on network for the life that I live is fantastic as a result of that company. These are social bullets that the companies can be giving. I think it's a marketing tool that they need to be focused on. These are like really persuasive posts that go out. If you were someone now deciding, Hey, I don't know what I want to do in college, or I don't know if I want to go to college. What job do I want in the future? If you're seeing your friends or your friends and brothers and sisters who got to travel because they remote work and they got to have really cool life experiences. I think the decision making will shift towards the more desirable and cooler to the youngsters careers as they look. But I agree with a lot of what you've said on people will maybe not want to transition into this fully remote model. There will be many who do. It will significantly change the lives of many people, parents and carers and people who want to live in rural places. Get out of the hustle and bustle and there'll be a huge cohort that do want it. But I think we haven't managed to see a phrase coin for it. I don't think we're trying to build for like a digital nomad platform at all. We're trying to build for people who would like to experience and dip their toe into that and come back. We have a more globalized world anyway, like the desire of people coming out of college to travel is constantly higher and higher. It's the highest travel month we ever had in history last month. I know COVID had a big impact on it, but yeah.
Yeah, totally. Totally. And the average employee is a 35 40 years old person who's making the money and able to pay for corporate services or any kind of service. They usually have kids, they usually have a family, they usually have commitment, they already have a circle of friends and whatever, but they still see this whole dream scenario of flexibility, which they still want to try. And that's totally okay. Obviously, in I don't know 20, 30 years forward in time. It's an interesting journey, right?
For sure. And even the family piece there is interesting because when we came into this, it was probably with a little bit of our own bias and saying, Hey, you look and say, I would like this. So therefore, people similar to me would probably like this. And a couple of people had said, Oh, families may not be able to use Roamer.
Yes.
Now, we've responded in terms of the usability in two ways to say, Hey, we want to make sure that whether you're a hybrid, whether you're fully remote or any version of distributed, you can be a user of Roamer. And that's thanks to a lot of those kind of work from abroad, work from anywhere policies. So you can use the house swap piece if you want. But also if you, if that doesn't suit you, if that doesn't suit your living arrangement, if that doesn't suit your feeling of trust or anything else. The map is where you can still interact and meet teams and go to meetups and arrange gatherings for your team. So we want it to be full suite, but we spoke then to some family, like parents who were thinking about how am I going to, how am I going to navigate this opportunity? And what we learned is actually most of the people we spoke to, most families that we spoke to the stress of a seven day holiday sometimes wasn't even worth it, right? The two day, two on the Monday and Sunday, going through the airport, bringing kids, packing the bag, getting them all ready. It's very stressful. If you can kick that stress out to a 30 day window, you're now spread out to a month.
Yes.
You're a little bit more comfortable with it. But I spoke to a gentleman called Tony who he's got from Cork who worked for Oracle. He said that they had always wanted to go to San Francisco, but the price was crazy. And he said the minimum was four and a half grand. The average on Airbnb was 16, 000 euros. And I haven't got that, but like crazy. Right now I know you have the high end ones that really matter, but in any case, like you're spending thousands and thousands on it. And he said with this, you actually could conceptualize a completely different holiday that was never even available to us. Like we would have never been able to access that kind of a trick. So now we can think about it a little bit differently and bringing kids maybe means that, okay, we can do it during the summer or we can do it during specific midterm windows. And maybe you're confined on dates, but I think what you actually have happened there is people will be confined to dates. And that will mean that the dates will align more on the swaps. So you'll actually potentially see more movement during those windows. So be interesting to see how it plays out. Also, another factor will be if there's two parents who are remote and historically they both used to have to take annual leave to go on a week or two week long holiday. And now potentially you can save some of those annual leave days and split your working weeks in novel new ways. So it'll be very cool to see how that plays out as well. But I do think that the way that people maybe might think about travel generally, aside from over, just generally in the future, I think people will holiday very differently and it's that kind of so holiday that you're describing there or maybe experimenting with particular on and off hours when they're traveling and saying, Hey, I'm actually going to take 3 hours in the middle of the day and then come back a little later. Not sure whether that's the best. I don't necessarily have full thoughts on it, but I think you'll see experimentation for sure.
Totally. This is a very interesting time at least for you and everyone else who' s active in this industry. How can people jump on your journey either as an individual or as a business?
Yeah, I think LinkedIn is probably where we spend most of our time. It's kind of the only place we spend time. We want to be a resource for HR teams, employee experience teams to say, Hey, here's what kind of some of the best in class companies are offering. Have a look at this resource. Here's a handbook that we found online. And it's not just about sharing, Hey, why you should buy Roamer. So yeah, the Roamer LinkedIn page is probably a good port of call or ROAMR. And then myself or Jason, you'd be able to follow either of us and connect. And by all means, we'd love to hear any thoughts anyone has as well. So please do share.
I appreciate your time and coming here. And this is, again, it's a really interesting and an inspiring journey.
