Extended-stay for remote workers: three concepts from the Helsinki region

Between a one-night booking and a twelve-month lease sits a growing category of travellers for whom standard hotel rooms were never designed. These guests need kitchens, workspaces, washing machines, and accommodation that supports everyday routines. Extended-stay concepts are forcing hospitality operators to rethink space, pricing, and service around weeks and months.

Research on post-pandemic travel points to growing interest in longer, slower trips that combine work and leisure, and a growing number of digital nomads risen sharply as remote work has become mainstream (Bozzi 2024).

Bassyiouny and Wilkesmann (2023) describe workations as a hybrid form of tourism that sits between leisure travel, business travel, and temporary relocation. In a mixed-methods study, Choe, Chen, Kang and Kang (2025) found that workation travelers value workspace quality, scenery, and local activities more than traditional leisure services.

Three Helsinki concepts, three bets

In the Finnish Hotel of Tomorrow 2.0 project, led by Haaga-Helia and Metropolia, we examined three Helsinki-region concepts that respond to this shift differently. UNITY Helsinki combines studio-style accommodation with coworking and communal spaces aimed at workation travelers. Noli Studios builds around flexibility and shared infrastructure, where longer stays reduce nightly pricing and residents share kitchens, saunas, and events. Hiisi Homes operates closer to a furnished housing network, offering apartments across Southern Finland with utilities included and pricing positioned against the rental market.

Three cases alone cannot show where the market is heading but the descriptions above point to three distinct categories: lifestyle hospitality (UNITY), flexible urban housing (Noli), and distributed serviced apartments (Hiisi Homes). Read this way, each concept makes a different bet about what the guest values most: a work-ready environment, community, or simplicity.

Each of these concepts runs on a different operational model from traditional hotels. Extended-stay accommodation sits between three systems: hotel, home, and office. Reception handles parcel deliveries and residential issues alongside check-ins. Housekeeping shifts from daily cleaning to weekly maintenance. Shared spaces function more like coworking environments and neighborhood infrastructure than transient hotel lobbies.

The operational case

When guests stay longer, the economics change. Longer stays reduce housekeeping load, stabilize occupancy, and make revenue more predictable. However, operators that are trying to combine short-stay hotel logic with residential living risk satisfying neither market. A one-night guest expects daily cleaning and a staffed front desk, while a one-month resident expects a real kitchen, laundry, and rent-like pricing.

Hybrid work has expanded the number of people who can temporarily relocate without taking a conventional holiday. All 17 companies in a 12-country study gave employees more formal flexibility over when and where they work (Šmite et al. 2023), and work from home has settled at roughly one day per week among college-educated employees globally (Aksoy et al. 2025). A traveller who previously combined separate business trips and vacations may now spend an entire month in one destination while working remotely from the same studio apartment.

The overlap with coworking is structural. Both industries monetize flexibility, infrastructure, and temporary belonging. The concepts introduced already offer some of the conditions travellers value (Choe et al. 2025): UNITY builds workspace quality into the stay, and Noli’s shared saunas and events bring local activity inside the building. Demand for workspace outside the office also shows up in the fast-growing Nordic coworking market (Pakalén & Lehtinen 2025), of which flexible, community-run model maps closely onto what extended-stay hotels are building.

The risk is that hotels continue designing extended-stay products with short-stay assumptions: a minibar but no stove, a desk that’s sized for checking email, daily cleaning the guest never asked for, and rates quoted only per night. Guests notice the difference quickly.

If the Finnish accommodation industry wants to reach remote workers who stay for weeks, the product matters as much as the destination. The question Finnish Hotel of Tomorrow 2.0 kept returning to is why some guests still choose a three-star hotel when a month in a furnished studio could serve them better. Corporate travel policies written around hotels, loyalty programs, and booking channels built to compare nightly rates are plausible reasons, each worth testing. The other half of the question is whether the industry can present each concept clearly enough that the right guest finds the right product.

Kuva: Haaga-Helia