I'm Not a Digital Nomad. I'm a Seasonaire.
Four years of travelling the world while getting paid for it. Here's how the season works.
I’ve spent 4 years travelling the world while getting paid to do it. No, I’m not a digital nomad. I’m a seasonaire.
Six months in the French Alps, days off spent learning to ski down the white slopes. Three on the West Coast of Canada, off days travelling to the turquoise lakes and gingerbread town of Banff. Six months on a cruise ship, docking around the Caribbean, the Bahamas and Central America. For me, the working hours went on running kids’ clubs and summer camps. But for you it could be sports, hosting, or even housekeeping.
I got into all of this almost by accident. My background was in childcare, and one night I was watching a cruise line dancer do a “day in the life” on TikTok and thought, surely they have kids’ clubs on these ships. They do. Turns out it’s a whole job. That single thought sent me down a path I’m still on.
So, here’s everything I wish someone had sat me down and explained before my first season.
The money looks bad. It isn’t (mostly).
The salaries look small. Like, really small. Like £600 a month small. But you have to think about expenses, or rather, the lack of them. Most jobs come with food and accommodation provided, and most places will cover your flights. That last one is changing: it’s becoming more common for companies to “contribute” or to pay you back at the end of a successful season rather than upfront, so read the fine print.
A lot of ski season jobs also throw in a season pass and rental gear. My biggest advice would be to think about how much you actually take home - as in what goes into your saving in your current role. Because with no expenses, that’s what that £600 really is.
Do not, for the love of god, buy your kit off the shelf
If you’re doing a ski season, please don’t walk into a shop and buy everything new. Get it off Vinted, or, I almost guarantee this, borrow it off colleagues once you arrive. Someone always has a spare jacket, spare goggles, spare everything. Don’t spend your full season’s income before you even get there.
Work out your niche
If you don’t know where to start, brainstorm the jobs that exist, or that must exist. That’s how the cruise-ship kids’ club clicked for me. These luxury places that deliver amazing perks and experiences to guests? Someone has to actually do it, and more importantly, be willing to move there to do it.
I’ve worked alongside personal trainers based in hotels. People whose entire job was leading sunrise hikes for luxury resorts. If a guest experience exists, a person is being paid to run it. Pick a niche if you can. Mine is childcare, and it gives you something to build on rather than starting from scratch every season.
You can progress, fast
A lot of people treat seasonal work as an extended gap year. It doesn’t have to be. The lifecycle of most seasonal workers is short. People do a season or two and move on, so if you’re good and you stick around, you rise quickly. Companies don’t want to gamble on people who’ll quit mid-season. They love a returner.
The summer-camp-in-three-years thing isn’t because I’m special (although I like to think I am). It’s because the ladder is short and half the people on it leave.
Just because the cycle’s short doesn’t mean everyone’s young
A recent comment on my Substack asked if everyone is in their early twenties. They’re not. It’s still incredibly common into your thirties, and I’ve worked with people well into their fifties. It’s just more common with younger people, they’re the ones willing to repack their whole lives every six months.
Always think a season ahead
This one caught me out. Companies start hiring at the start of their off-season, which makes the timelines feel backwards. If you’ve just started a summer job and you want a winter one, you’ll be doing interviews from your staff accommodation before you’ve even unpacked your suitcase. Get comfortable living one season in the future, all the time.
Prepare for long weeks
In the EU, at least, a lot of places have you sign a document opting out of the 48-hour working week. Translation: you’ll often get one day off a week. (Ski seasons tend to be a bit kinder, usually a day and a half. I think they realise you get happier staff if you let them spend their time staring longingly at the slopes they actually want to be on.) The hours are heavy, and so is the tiredness.
Relationships, of all kinds, are more intense.
Living and working with the same people, all day, every day, is not for the faint of heart.
Sometimes you’ll be in a resort of 100 staff, but even then your team will be closer to 10. I’ve worked seasons where the only English-speaking people on the entire mountain are the five others you work with and share a flat with. It’s intense in a way that’s hard to explain until you’re in it. The friendships are amazing. The total lack of personal and mental space, less so.
You never really clock out
In a small resort town the guests are everywhere, and you represent the company whether you’re technically clocked in or not. It’s not so much an unwritten rule as something that’ll be in your contract. But you can’t get blackout drunk in a bar and expect a parent to hand over their child to you the next day. Or have a raging row with a colleague and then be all smiles hosting aqua aerobics.
It’s weird, because guests love to drink with you, and they’ll get messy. But you can’t.
Don’t forget the travel part of a travel job
You’ll be tired. But on your day off, get out. Explore the place you’ve landed in, even if it’s just taking a book to the beach. It is so easy to spend your one day off horizontal in your room and then look up at the end of the season realising you saw the staff canteen and not much else. Don’t forget why you came.
Make friends outside your own department
I cannot stress this enough. Different departments get different perks, and the trades are glorious. In the kids’ club we’ve always got the good snacks. The fitness guys know the best hikes. The activity hosts can get you into the local bars. Be the person who knows people everywhere. It makes the whole season better.
You’ll get near-local knowledge
You spend months there. It’s not just your days off exploring, it’s the morning coffee run and the dinner drinks. You know the best places for a wild night and the best for a goss with the girlies. You’ll learn which slope is best in the afternoon once the snow’s gone slippy, and which supermarket to avoid if you don’t want to get stuck in a thirty-minute charade with the cashier.
In some places, seasonal workers are as close to locals as it gets. While the main city stays open year-round, regional Corfu, for example, all but shuts down in winter. Its bars fill with hospitality workers who’ve come over from mainland Greece for the tourist season. So if you’re part of that horde of seasonal workers, and you don’t act like a Brit abroad, you can really feel like part of the community
You’ll fall in love
Maybe with a person, though read about the dangers of a 4-9-1 here
Maybe with the place.
But definitely with yourself. You’ll find yourself taking risks you wouldn’t normally take, showing up more authentically for your friends (not always in the best way, 2am breakdowns are pretty authentic too). You turn into holiday you, all the time. And that’s pretty hard not to fall in love with.
The real payoff
The wages are small, the weeks are long, and you’ll share a bathroom with strangers. But you also end up with something money can’t really buy: you learn a place from the inside, and gain some friends for life while doing it.
There’s so much more to learn about seasonal work - it’s a minefield and unknown to so many. So let me know what else you’d like to know.
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Coming up this week, a weekly blog where I learn to drive the boat on the island, and a Trip to Karijini.
Neve
xx
I only just got round to reading this one and it's nailed it!