The line between working and holidaying has blurred for a great many people, and villas have quietly become one of the most popular places to blur it. A house with several bedrooms, fast broadband and a pool is an appealing base from which to keep a job ticking over while the family enjoys the sun. Done well, a working stay stretches a one-week holiday into three and lets you travel outside the punishing peak season. Done badly, it produces the worst of both worlds: a stressful working environment with none of the comforts of your real office, and a resentful family who feel they came all this way to watch you stare at a laptop. The difference lies almost entirely in preparation and boundaries.
Verify the Connection Before You Commit
Nothing derails a working stay faster than discovering the advertised broadband cannot support a video call. Listings often describe internet in optimistic terms, so treat vague promises with caution. Ask the host directly for the actual download and upload speeds, and pay particular attention to the upload figure, because that is what carries your voice and image on a call and it is almost always the weaker number. If your work depends on being reliably online, ask for this in writing and, where possible, for a recent speed test rather than a reassurance.
Always build in a backup. Mobile coverage in many rural areas is now strong enough to run a call from a phone hotspot, so check the local network coverage for the villa’s exact location, not just the region. A local prepaid data SIM or a portable hotspot device with a generous data plan is cheap insurance against the morning the house connection drops during an important meeting. Knowing you have a fallback removes a background hum of anxiety that would otherwise follow you around all week.
Build a Workspace, Not a Perch
A dining chair and a glass table look fine in photographs and become torture after two hours. If you are going to work for several days, you need a spot that supports your body and your concentration. Scout the villa on arrival for a location with a stable table at the right height, a chair you can tolerate, and a power socket within reach so you are not working around a dying battery. Natural light is your friend, but direct sun on a screen is not, so choose a spot where the light falls from the side rather than behind or in front of you.
Think about the video-call background too, both for professionalism and for privacy. A calm wall or a tasteful view reads far better than a cluttered kitchen or a doorway through which children keep wandering. Position yourself so that the camera catches something you are happy for colleagues to see. A few minutes spent arranging this on the first morning saves you shuffling furniture before every call for the rest of the week.
Respect the Time Zone Maths
If you are travelling across time zones, work out the overlap with your colleagues before you go and be honest with yourself about what it means. A two-hour difference can be a gift, giving you quiet early mornings to work before anyone at home is online. A larger gap can trap you into evening calls that eat the very hours you most wanted to spend at the table with your family. Map your unavoidable fixed commitments, the standing meetings and the deadlines, onto local time and look at the shape of the week that results. Sometimes a small adjustment, shifting a recurring call by thirty minutes, protects an entire evening.
Agree the Boundaries With the People You Travelled With
The most common source of friction on a working holiday is not the wi-fi but the humans. Everyone needs to understand the deal before it begins. Tell your travel companions which hours you genuinely have to work and, just as importantly, which hours you are fully theirs. Vague availability is the enemy, because it leaves you half-working all day and the family half-expecting you all day, and nobody gets what they wanted. A clear statement such as being at the desk until one, then off entirely, lets everyone plan around you and holds you to switching off when the time comes.
Physical separation reinforces the mental one. If you can work behind a door, or at least in a room set apart from the pool and the living area, you signal clearly when you are on duty and when you are not. When the laptop closes, close it fully and put it out of sight. A working stay only succeeds if the working part has an end each day.
Handle the Practical Details
A handful of small preparations prevent the frustrations that erode a working day. Bring the right power adapters and, ideally, a compact power strip so a single adapter can charge everything at once. Pack a decent pair of headphones with a microphone for calls, because the villa’s echoey stone rooms and the buzz of the pool pump rarely make for clear audio. If your work involves sensitive information, be cautious about public or shared networks and consider whether your employer requires a secure connection. Downloading anything large you might need in advance, over the connection at home, spares you gambling on the villa’s bandwidth at a crucial moment.
Protecting the Holiday Inside the Work
The whole point of working from a villa rather than the office is that the moment you shut the laptop, the holiday is right there waiting. That only remains true if you defend the boundary you set. Take the long lunches. Join the afternoon swim. Let the mornings you are not working belong entirely to the people you came with. Handled with a little discipline and a lot of honesty, a villa becomes the rare place where earning a living and enjoying a holiday can genuinely share the same week, and both come out better for it.