Airbnb Is Selling Desks in London Now. But Naples Is Apparently the World’s Seventh-Best Place to Use One.
The ranking comes from a company that sells flexible offices, so no, we are not treating it as sacred scripture. But Airbnb’s quiet move into London workspace bookings suggests that work, travel and temporary living are becoming part of the same market — whether or not anyone can bear the word “workcation”.
Naples has been named the seventh-best city in the world for a workcation in 2026. Before anyone orders a commemorative plaque, announces the birth of the Mediterranean Silicon Valley or creates a permanent municipal committee on laptop-friendly pizza, there are a few things we should probably mention.
The ranking comes from International Workplace Group, or IWG, which operates thousands of flexible workspaces in more than 120 countries. IWG assessed 50 cities using criteria including climate, culture, accommodation, food, transport, broadband, sustainability and, conveniently enough, the availability of flexible offices.
This is a press release produced by a company with a direct commercial interest in convincing us that people increasingly want to work from places other than their traditional office. We are reporting it, not entering into a blood oath with it.
Asking IWG whether flexible working has a future is slightly like asking a hotel group whether people should travel more, or asking a Neapolitan restaurant whether another pizza might be a good idea. The answer was never going to be a hesitant no.
That does not make the underlying trend imaginary.
IWG’s 2026 ranking places Bangkok first, followed by Tokyo, Barcelona, Porto, Vancouver and Budapest. Naples arrives in seventh place, ahead of Medellín, Lisbon and Seoul. It scores particularly well for culture, food, transport, access to nature and relatively affordable accommodation.
Everyone is free to argue about the order. Rankings of this kind are essentially organised disagreement with a spreadsheet attached. Whether Naples genuinely offers better transport for remote workers than Seoul is a question we shall leave to braver people, preferably those with several free evenings and no fear of social media.
The more important question is why a global office company believes it is worth producing an annual ranking of cities in which people might combine work and travel. The answer is not that the entire professional class has abandoned civilisation to type emails from hammocks. It is that a significant number of people can now move work around their lives in ways that were unusual before 2020.
Remote working fell from its pandemic peak, but it did not disappear. A Stanford-led study of more than 16,000 university-educated workers across 40 countries found that working from home declined between 2022 and 2023 and then broadly stabilised. It remains most common in North America, Britain and Australia, where compatible workers average roughly one and a half to two days away from the employer’s premises each week.
In Great Britain, 28 per cent of working adults were hybrid workers between January and March 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics. Among full-time workers the figure was 34 per cent, rising to 36 per cent among people aged 30 to 49. Hybrid work is far from universal and is disproportionately available to better-paid, highly qualified professionals. But it is large enough to reshape services, property and travel.
And then there is Airbnb.
First the bed, now the desk
In July 2026, Airbnb began testing workspace bookings in London with operators Oneder and Work.Life. Customers can book coworking day passes and, at selected locations, private offices and meeting rooms.
Oneder is offering bookings at Kindling in White City and Channel in King’s Cross. A user can reserve a desk for the day, a private office or a room for a meeting without taking out a membership or signing a longer-term agreement.
This is not yet Airbnb conquering the global office market. It is a small London experiment involving a limited number of locations. There is no need to put “the death of the office” in capital letters or invite six futurists onto a panel.
But it is an unusually clear signal.
Airbnb was built around answering one question: where will I stay? It is now experimenting with a second one: where will I work while I am staying there?
For a person spending ten days or three weeks in London, the distinction matters. The kitchen table in a short-term rental may be charming in the photographs and completely unusable once a laptop, charger, coffee cup and human spine are introduced. The sofa may look excellent beneath a carefully positioned blanket while being less effective during a confidential call with a client.
A professional workspace provides reliable internet, a proper chair, a quiet room and, in the best cases, the possibility of meeting another adult without first moving a suitcase from the only available surface.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Until now, travellers booked accommodation on one platform and then searched elsewhere for somewhere to work. Bringing the two together turns workspace into an extension of the stay, much like an airport transfer, a rental car or a local experience.
The office has not vanished. It is being unbundled and sold by the day.
The average hybrid traveller is not an influencer in a hammock
The phrase “digital nomad” tends to produce a very specific image: a young, permanently tanned person staring thoughtfully at a laptop beside an infinity pool, apparently earning money without ever receiving an inconvenient telephone call.
The real market is considerably less photogenic and much larger.
It includes consultants who remain in a city for a few days after meeting a client, employees who travel to see family and work remotely before their holiday begins, founders spending part of the month in another market and professionals who can turn a seven-day trip into a two-week stay by working for four or five of those days.
They are not necessarily trying to escape the office forever. They are trying to avoid choosing between travelling and being productive.
We see this regularly in conversations around NoMag. People are not usually asking how to become full-time nomads. They are asking whether they can stay longer, divide their time differently or find a professional base when they are away from home.
Sometimes they want community. Quite often they simply want a door that closes.
This is why the workspace element matters. Work-from-anywhere sounds wonderful until “anywhere” turns out to be a noisy café with one plug socket, a short-term rental with decorative Wi-Fi or a bedroom in which the only desk is technically a bedside table.
The glamour of location independence can fade rapidly during a video call conducted next to a boiler.
Naples has the raw material. Infrastructure is the actual test
Naples is not an absurd choice for this market. It has international connections, high-speed rail, an extraordinary cultural offer, food that does not require a brand consultancy to explain it and easy access to islands, archaeological sites and the coast. For many international visitors, it is also still cheaper than London, Paris or Barcelona.
The city has something that cannot easily be manufactured: character. Even its inconveniences tend to arrive with a story, although this becomes less charming when the inconvenience involves an internet connection five minutes before a presentation.
The ranking should therefore be treated as an opportunity, not a certificate of completion. Attracting longer-stay professionals requires more than good weather and carbohydrates. It requires reliable broadband, suitable accommodation, bookable workspaces, services in English, predictable transport and a tourism strategy that does not simply convert every available home into a short-term rental.
A city cannot live indefinitely on scenery, international affection and the assumption that visitors will forgive everything because lunch was excellent.
There is also a social question. Workcation travellers and remote professionals often earn salaries set in wealthier cities or countries. Their spending can support local businesses and extend tourism beyond the conventional holiday season. It can also put additional pressure on housing and neighbourhoods if every policy is designed for the temporary visitor and none for the person who actually lives there.
The winner will not necessarily be the city with the prettiest waterfront or the most flattering ranking. It will be the city that can convert temporary interest into a functioning ecosystem without turning itself into a theme park with fibre broadband.
A terrible word for a real market
“Workcation” remains an unpleasant word. It sounds like something invented in a meeting attended by people who describe themselves as passionate about synergies. It also risks suggesting that working beside the sea is automatically a holiday, which is rarely true for either the worker or the people receiving their emails.
But the behaviour it describes is real.
People with sufficient flexibility are extending trips, leaving earlier, returning later and combining periods of work with time spent elsewhere. Employers are using flexibility as part of their talent proposition. Hospitality businesses are beginning to treat a proper desk and verified internet speed as meaningful amenities. Workspace operators are selling offices in smaller units of time. And Airbnb is testing whether the desk can be booked alongside the bed.
That is the story. Not whether Naples deserves precisely seventh place, Bangkok first or Seoul tenth.
The ranking is marketing, and should be read as marketing. The survey reflects particular workers in particular countries. The companies involved have interests, products and ambitions of their own.
Yet dismissing the entire subject because a press release is promotional would be intellectually comfortable and commercially foolish.
Work is becoming less attached to a single building. Travel is becoming less neatly separated from working life. The office is becoming a service that people can use when and where they need it.
Naples may or may not be the seventh-best city in the world from which to answer an email. But the market for people who want to stay longer — provided they can find somewhere decent to open their laptop — is becoming rather difficult to pretend does not exist.