Company Develops 'Work From Hotel' Concept In Post-COVID World

COVID may be subsiding, but hybrid work and working from home have become the norm for some employees, and Americans are increasingly combining travel with their workday life.

Entrepeneur Obatalia Yemoshunya is one of the many Americans changing the meaning of WFH. For them the acronym doesn’t just mean work from home but work from hotel. The former Los Angeles resident now lives in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, and has started spending some of her workdays inside new pods at the family friendly, all-inclusive Sensira Resort & Spa south of Cancun, renting a remote office for $30 a day.

“It’s a beautiful environment,” she said. “You have room service; I don’t have to think about cooking.”

The workspaces are a partnership between the hotel, where CBS News Correspondent Wendy Gillette stayed for a reduced rate, and a company called REMO, which had a launch date in Ukraine two days before the war started.

Plan B was a handful of modular office spaces recently installed at Sensira, which REMO’s CEO, who’s still based in Kyiv, just visited. “I'm lucky,” said Yaroslav Prygara. “Because my family helped me a lot, and my friends were together with me and my team in REMO also.” Now that the company is up and running in Mexico, the goal is to expand internationally and in the United States. REMO’s co-founder, Carrington Hill, says, “I think it’s going to work because our world has changed. Our world has changed drastically and we’re not going back to how it was before.”

A Gallup Poll from the summer found five in 10 U.S. remote-capable employees are working hybrid and three in 10 are fully remote. The office space at Sensira is free for hotel guests if they book rooms through remo.club.

Other hotel brands are also enticing guests to work at their properties. The Work from Hyatt program, which includes booking an office for the day as well as extended stay perks like waived resort fees, is still running through the end of the year.

WorkSpaces for Hilton continues to offer rooms to use for the day. And Marriott’s Day Pass program is also still active.