Two of the biggest advantages of teaching online are the flexibility to choose your own working schedule and the ability to work from almost anywhere with a decent internet connection. This means online teaching can be GREAT for slow travel. Rather than rushing from city to city every few days to see all the highlights, you can stay in one place for weeks or even months to slowly enjoy what that place has to offer.

Slow travel is one of the best ways to experience a new place. You get settled into a routine, figure out what the good restaurants are, become a regular at your local grocery store, make some friends with locals or other expats/nomads. You still get the excitement of being somewhere new, but without constantly feeling like you’re on vacation.

For online teachers, the nomadic slow travel lifestyle can be lots of fun and surprisingly practical.

1) Your job goes wherever you go

Not many people are fortunate enough to be able to make money from their laptops. As an online teacher, your classroom is literally online. You don’t need to find a new job every time you move to a new city. As long as you have the equipment and internet connection you need, you can teach from an Airbnb in Mexico, a hotel in Portugal, or a traditional home in Japan.

This makes it possible to stay somewhere longer without putting your career on hold. Instead of thinking, “I can only travel for two weeks because I have to go back to work,” you can think, “Why not stay here for two months??” That shift completely changes the way you plan your travels and it’s also way less exhausting.

2) You don’t have to squeeze everything into a vacation

Traditional travel often comes with a strange sense of urgency. You have a limited number of vacation days, so you try to see everything. Here’s what it might look like: three days here, two days there, a day trip, another museum, a different restaurant, another early morning flight. By the end of the trip, you might have seen a lot, but you’re exhausted and you haven’t necessarily experienced much.

Slow travel gives you permission to take your time. If you’re teaching online, you can spend your mornings working, take the afternoon off to explore, and stay in the same city for several weeks. You don’t need to see every attraction on a particular day because you’ll still be there next week.

3) You can build your work schedule around your life

One of the biggest benefits of online teaching is flexibility. Depending on your students, platform, and schedule, you may be able to choose when you teach. That means you can build your workday around the things you want to do rather than trying to fit your entire life into evenings and weekends.

Want to hike on a Wednesday morning? Teach in the afternoon. Want to take a long weekend to visit another city? Adjust your schedule. Want to spend your afternoons exploring and work in the evenings? That can work too! The important thing is that you’re not necessarily tied to the traditional Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 work schedule and you can plan your working hours around the fun things you want to do.

4) Slow travel can make travel less expensive

This may sound counterintuitive because you’ll be traveling for a longer time, but if you think about it, slow travel is just temporarily changing where you live. Staying longer in one location isn’t just better for your sanity, it’s also better for your wallet. When you’re moving every few days, you’re constantly paying for transportation, short-term accommodation, airport transfers, tourist activities, and eating out.

Staying somewhere for a month gives you more opportunities to find affordable accommodation, cook your own meals, use public transportation, and live more like a local. You can rent an apartment with a kitchen instead of staying in hotels. You can shop at the local market instead of eating at restaurants every day. And instead of spending money trying to entertain yourself constantly, you can simply live your normal life somewhere new.

This is one reason slow travel and online jobs work so well together. You’re not taking an expensive vacation. You’re temporarily living somewhere else.

5) You get to experience the ordinary parts of a place

When most people travel, they’re in a rush to see the highlights and then they leave. They visit the famous landmarks, take a bajillion photos, eat at the most popular restaurants, and move on. Although there’s nothing wrong with that, isn’t it true that some of our favourite travel memories come from things that would never make it onto a traditional tourist itinerary?

Stumbling across a hole-in-the-wall cafe. Walking through a new neighbourhood because you have the time. Finding a cute little grocery store. Figuring out the bus system. Having a conversation with your local neighbours. Getting to know the rhythms of a city. When you stay somewhere longer, these ordinary experiences become part of your life. And that’s what makes slow travel feel less like tourism and more like actually living somewhere new.

Have you tried slow travel while working online? Share your experience in the comments! And if you’re considering combining online teaching with slow travel, stay tuned for next week’s article, where we’ll share five more reasons why this lifestyle can be such a great fit.