40% of International Business Travelers No Longer Head Straight Home—They're Doing Bleisure!
🌍 Bleisure: The New Trend in Business Travel
📍 What you'll find in this post
- 🌍 Bleisure: The New Trend in Business Travel
- ✈️ How to Manage Bleisure and Connectivity
- 🌐 Combining Remote Work and Tourism in Colombia
- 🌍 Viajemos Cooptraiss and Bleisure: A New Approach for Colombian Travelers
- 🌎 Destinations and Tips for a Bleisure Trip in Mexico
- 🌐 Quito, Cuenca, and Beyond: A Look at the Future of Remote Work
40% of international business travelers no longer head straight home—they're doing bleisure! A guide for Latin American bleisure travelers
It's 10 p.m. in a Mexico City hotel, and your laptop is still open after a full day of meetings. Your flight home isn't for a while, and you have nothing scheduled until noon the next day. The question you ask yourself is simple: why not extend the trip a little and get to know this place? That question, multiplied by millions of business travelers around the world, is exactly what gave rise to the term bleisure—a blend of business and leisure that describes people who extend a work trip to enjoy some downtime too.
What a few years ago was a perk for executives with generous expense budgets is now common among Latin American professionals who travel for work fairly often: consultants, sales managers, people in international sales roles, freelancers serving clients in other countries, and, more and more, remote employees who simply choose to work from another city for a week or two.
Digital nomad vs. bleisure: what's the difference?
The first misunderstanding worth clearing up is the confusion between staying a few extra days after a work meeting and formally becoming a digital nomad. They're two different things. If your employer sends you to a meeting in Lima and you decide to stay four more days to visit the Sacred Valley, you're still entering and leaving the country as a tourist, with your passport and, at most, a business visa (if the country requires one for the work portion). You don't need a digital nomad visa for that.
Visas like Spain's—which requires net monthly income of about €2,800 (US$3,233.19) and comprehensive health insurance—or Portugal's, with a somewhat lower but similar income threshold, are designed for people who want to settle in for several months or even years while working remotely for clients or employers outside the destination country, not for someone extending a work trip by a week. Mixing up the two leads many people to go through unnecessary paperwork or, worse, to worry about an immigration issue that doesn't actually apply to them.
✈️ How to Manage Bleisure and Connectivity
Where you do need to pay attention is taxes, and occasional bleisure is almost always safe here. Most countries apply some version of the 183-day rule to determine tax residency: if you spend less than half a year within their borders in a 12-month period, you generally don't become a tax resident or take on local tax obligations for your foreign income. The problem starts when someone repeatedly combines bleisure with remote work, racking up weeks in the same country over the year without keeping track. If your profile is closer to a recurring digital nomad than an occasional traveler extending a business trip...
...it's worth keeping a simple count of the days you spend in each country and checking with an accountant if the total starts getting close to that limit.
Where bleisure really differs from tourism is connectivity, because there's no room to improvise. A tourist can get by on hotel Wi-Fi and spend half the day exploring offline (though that's not ideal either), but a bleisure traveler has at least one video call, deliverable, or urgent email that can't wait for a “decent” public network to show up. “Free Wi-Fi” at airports, cafés, and hotels is still notoriously unreliable: speeds vary by time of day, it asks for your personal information, and at busy tourist destinations it can crash right when you need it most.
That's where having an active Conecty eSIM changes everything: you have your own mobile data that works as soon as you land, with no need to hunt for a SIM card shop at the airport or swap SIMs every time you cross a border on the same trip. For someone who goes from a meeting in Bogotá to another in Panama City and ends the week on a beach, an eSIM means no waiting in line and no relying on your home carrier's roaming. That's exactly why services like Conecty focus on international data coverage designed for this kind of mixed itinerary, where connectivity isn't a luxury but a job requirement.
How to extend a business trip for personal reasons without it becoming a problem.
🌐 Combining Remote Work and Tourism in Colombia
Quick tip: It's always a good idea to talk to whoever handles travel at your company to learn the policy on extending your stay. This can prevent misunderstandings about who covers the extra costs.
First, talk to whoever handles travel at your company before booking anything on your own. Many corporate policies let you extend your stay as long as you cover the extra cost of flights, hotel, and meals for those days, and it's clear in writing what the company pays and what you pay. Second, check whether changing your return date comes with a change fee: if the corporate agency booked the original reservation at a basic fare, changing it may cost more than buying a separate one-way flight, so it's worth comparing both options before deciding.
Which Colombian cities are ideal for combining remote work and tourism?
Bogotá has the most corporate activity in the country, and from there a flight of less than an hour takes you to the Coffee Region (Pereira, Manizales, Armenia). Medellín combines something few cities manage: a thriving coworking and remote-work scene, with neighborhoods like El Poblado full of spaces designed for professionals who stay and work for weeks, plus easy access to Guatapé or eastern Antioquia for the weekend. Cartagena, although better known as a pure leisure destination, also hosts a large share of the country's meetings and conventions, so it's not unusual to wrap up a workday there and simply walk to the ocean. Barranquilla, with fewer coworking options but a growing industry, is starting to show up on this map too.
Which companies offer bleisure travel packages for professionals in Colombia?
No Colombian agency currently sells a "bleisure package" under that exact name, but several already build this service into their corporate travel lines:
Grupo VDT
Works mainly with travel agencies and also offers corporate travel and tourism services. A traveler might start with a corporate need and later use the same agency for personal, family, or vacation trips.
Travel Depot
A wholesaler with strong experience in groups, incentives, and corporate conventions, as well as vacation packages, it offers that same natural bridge between business travel, incentive trips, and leisure travel.
🌍 Viajemos Cooptraiss and Bleisure: A New Approach for Colombian Travelers
Viajemos Cooptraiss (Viacoop): an agency focused especially on Colombia's cooperative sector, offering domestic and international trips, group travel, and personalized experiences. Travelers connected to the cooperative sector may first travel for work and later for vacations, family, or personal experiences.
✈️ How can you use airline loyalty programs for bleisure trips from Colombia?
For frequent flyers, the most relevant program is LifeMiles (Avianca), one of the most awarded loyalty programs in Latin America. It lets you earn miles even without flying, through co-branded credit cards or purchases at partner merchants. For bleisure travelers, the value isn't just in free tickets but in Elite status perks—seat selection, VIP lounge access, and priority boarding—which make it much easier to pair a work flight with a leisure flight on the same itinerary. Plus, thanks to the partnership with Conecty, you can buy your SIM/eSIM with your miles or earn miles when you buy from Conecty.
For organizing itineraries, there's TripIt: just forward your flight, hotel, and car rental confirmations to its email address and it automatically builds a single itinerary with real-time change alerts—especially useful when your trip mixes bookings made by your company with ones you made yourself for your leisure days. To round things out, Google Maps and Google Translate help you get around, read reviews of the places you want to visit, and communicate at your destination. If you're traveling with someone or coordinating activities with other people, apps like Travefy let you share your full itinerary and split expenses without relying on makeshift spreadsheets.
🇲🇽 And what does bleisure look like in Mexico?
Mexico City: has the largest selection of coworking spaces in the country, great flight connections to the rest of the region, and neighborhoods like La Condesa and Roma where working from a café is as easy as finding a great place to eat afterward.
Guadalajara: has grown into a tech and business hub, with a calmer vibe than the capital and plenty of food and culture to fill your free time.
🌎 Destinations and Tips for a Bleisure Trip in Mexico
Mérida: offers safety, peace and quiet, and a growing community of remote professionals, with the bonus of being close to the coast and archaeological sites.
Playa del Carmen: already has a well-established coworking infrastructure thanks to its digital nomad community.
How do you plan an efficient bleisure trip from Mexico City?
The key is choosing a leisure destination that doesn't eat up too much travel time. Puebla, Valle de Bravo, and Tepoztlán are less than two and a half hours away by car, so you can leave a meeting at noon on Friday and be settled in by the afternoon. If your work schedule allows, another efficient option is to book the meeting early in the week and save the rest for exploring, instead of the usual approach of leaving the fun for the end—that way you're not counting on the meeting running on time to protect your downtime.
Which hotels in Mexico specialize in bleisure travel?
Radisson Hotel Group: its Guadalajara hotel, geared toward business travelers, was designed to add leisure options for corporate guests, with an outdoor pool, a fitness area, and event spaces that double as informal workspaces.
In the Querétaro and San Miguel de Allende area, some hotels specifically offer that mix of coworking and leisure stays, with local wine tourism as a bonus. For longer stays, a good option is Holiday Inn Express, which has a business center, laundry service, and transportation to nearby points of interest. And for lodging with coworking areas and entertainment options in general, the Riviera Maya is another option—it's still one of the few places that explicitly combines both under one roof instead of offering them as separate services.
In the end, what sets an experienced bleisure traveler apart isn't knowing how to extend a work trip, but understanding that on this kind of trip, the line between productivity and rest depends on small details: a connection that doesn't fail at the exact moment you need it, clarity about which days count for tax purposes, and the confidence that not everything that sounds like complicated immigration paperwork actually is.
How do you combine work and travel in Ecuador?
🌐 Quito, Cuenca, and Beyond: A Look at the Future of Remote Work
Quito and Guayaquil are the country's business hubs, and both share an advantage that few travelers in the region make the most of.
Cuenca, while not as big a corporate center as the other two, has become an unexpected remote-work hotspot: it's home to IMPAQTO, one of the region's best-known coworking networks, and its cost of living is considerably lower than Quito's, making it appealing for anyone extending a work trip by a few days.
For leisure, proximity helps: Quito is just over three hours by car from Baños de Agua Santa, the country's most visited town for adventure and hot springs, and less than two hours from Otavalo and its Indigenous market, one of the largest in South America.
And if you can stretch your work trip a little longer, there's the Galápagos—just plan carefully, since the national park entrance fee for foreigners has gone up to US$200.
The next time you wrap up a meeting in another country and wonder whether it's worth staying a few more days, the answer probably won't depend on the destination anymore, but on whether you've taken care of that invisible detail that lets you work from anywhere without anyone on the other end of the video call noticing.
If you're a bleisure traveler, connectivity shouldn't be what ruins your plans. At Conecty, we offer corporate agreements designed for companies and travelers like you, so your team has reliable internet from the moment you land—without depending on hotel Wi-Fi or roaming with extra charges—whether they're working or relaxing.
To learn about the agreements available for your company, you can contact Johanna Mosquera, our customer service coordinator, directly at +57 304 4356286. We'd be happy to help!
Autor:
Camila Rodríguez
Camila Rodríguez es mercadóloga de profesión, investigadora por curiosidad y viajera por obsesión, especializada en crear contenido para viajeros hiperconectados. Su enfoque fusiona dos de sus grandes pasiones: las nuevas tecnologías y la conectividad internacional (porque, seamos honestos, quedarse sin señal en el fin del mundo ya no está de moda). Camila escribe desde la empatía y la frescura, dejando de lado los discursos aburridos o clichés de folleto para lograr que el lector se sienta identificado. Su método se basa en menos teoría y más práctica: investiga a fondo, analiza tendencias y testea herramientas digitales antes de recomendarlas. Ofrece un combo perfecto que combina historias reales, tecnología útil y datos salvavidas para resolver las necesidades del viajero en ruta: qué apps descargar, cómo mantenerse comunicado en cualquier esquina del planeta y qué errores evitar para no sufrir en el intento. Para Camila, la creatividad no es un adorno, sino el puente para conectar con las personas y sus historias, invitándolas a guardar el mapa, sacar el celular y explorar el mundo con la información correcta y la mejor señal.
