TUI Takes Its Own Remote Working Further With Free Hotel Stays

25.08.2023 - 14:39 / skift.com / Matthew Parsons

TUI’s remote work policy, launched during the pandemic, is set to evolve as the travel giant looks to offer its staff free stays across its hotel and resort network.

The so-called Workwide scheme was set up in August last year, and allows employees to work anywhere in the world for up to 30 working days, which equates to six weeks. They can also tag holidays either side to extend the duration.

It’s proved a hit. In just over a year, employees notched up a collective 10,000 days of remote working. If that were one employee, it’s the equivalent of 38 years, TUI’s chief people officer Sybille Reiss has calculated. It’s almost enough to retire, but Reiss is only getting started.

TUI acted relatively early on in July 2021 to offer remote work (where possible) to its 60,000-strong workforce, several months ahead of Airbnb.

A month later it launched Workwide because employees said they needed more flexibility, particularly if they had relocated during the pandemic and wanted to spend time with family in their home country.

Now for the next phase Reiss said TUI will look at offering free accommodation. That means keeping enough rooms available for growing numbers of applicants, which sounds like a revenue manager’s nightmare.

“We’d like to progress the approach a little bit. What we’d like to do now, starting maybe at the end of the spring season, we have left rooms sometimes, and we’d like to offer that to our people, to get our people into the hotel experience of TUI. Even on a cruise ship,” Reiss said.

“We’d like to merge the TUI resort feeling with our approach of TUI Workwide, we’d give that for a limited price. The thinking is they’d just have to pay for food, but the hotel rooms are for free … this is our current thinking,” she added.

There are plenty of findings non-travel companies can learn from. First, it’s not just about staff jetting off to exotic destinations. TUI’s most popular Workwide destinations are the UK, Spain and Germany.

“Sometimes people in our Caribbean office are traveling to London and would like to work from London, or Berlin,” Reiss said.

TUI is also pushing ahead with its digitization process, and that means staffing up on developers. Access to its resorts, or the chance to work anywhere, is a valuable tool when hiring. “Recruiting, especially in the digital space, we have new fields we can recruit from. From banks, because this flexibility is not offered by many employers,” Reiss said.

And Reiss also believes it doesn’t need to be complicated. Staying below 30 days means staff don’t get caught up in any tax rules.

“I would recommend to any other chief people officers, give that flexibility,” she said. “Because we know people would like to change jobs, and they’re looking out