Most people planning to work from abroad think about flights and wifi. Maybe a VPN. That's about where the planning stops.
I build these setups for people. Home server, travel router, residential IP, the full stack. And every time I travel, I run through the same checklist myself to test the setup end to end. Not because I expect it to break, but because finding out something doesn't work at the airport is not the time.
This is that checklist. Whether you've built your own setup or had someone do it for you, this is what to check before you go.
Before you leave
The worst time to find out something doesn't work is when you've already landed. Everything on this list happens while you're still at home with access to your server and your normal network.
If you've got a personal VPN server running at home (Raspberry Pi, mini PC, whatever), the goal is to verify the full chain: your device, travel router, tunnel, home server, internet. Every link in that chain needs to work before you leave.
If you're relying on a commercial VPN, most of this still applies, but you won't have a home exit point, which means your IP is still a datacenter address. That's a separate problem (covered in How to Keep Your UK IP Address While Living Abroad).
The hardware
What goes in the bag:
- Travel router (GL-iNet Beryl AX or similar). Pocket-sized, runs OpenWRT, handles the tunnel
- One ethernet cable. For connecting your laptop to the travel router
- USB-C cable for the router's power
- That's it
The server stays at home. It runs 24/7. The travel router is the client end. That's the only hardware you take with you.
Test everything at home
This is the bit people skip, and it's the most important part.
Before you leave, connect your laptop to the travel router at home — not to your normal wifi. Then check:
- whatismyip.com shows your UK home IP (not a foreign or datacenter IP)
- BBC iPlayer loads and plays something
- Your bank's website and app both work
- Teams or Slack video calls work normally
- The tunnel reconnects on its own after you unplug the travel router and plug it back in
That last one matters. If you're in an Airbnb and the power blips, the router needs to reconnect automatically. Don't find out it doesn't after you've already left.
If your setup uses DuckDNS for dynamic IP handling, verify it's updating. Unplug your home router for a minute, let it get a new IP, check DuckDNS resolves to the new one, and confirm the tunnel comes back up.
The human checklist
The technical stuff is the easy part. This is the list that actually catches people — and it only applies if your employer doesn't know you're abroad. If you're just here for streaming and banking, skip to day one.
- Social media during work hours. Turn off location tags on your work device. No stories from a cafe on a Tuesday afternoon that colleagues can see. Tell friends not to tag you in anything work people follow. This is the number one way people get caught. Not by technology. By an Instagram story a colleague happened to see.
- Work laptop clock stays on UK time. Always. Some apps and services leak timezone info. Your personal phone can stay on local time.
- Slack and Teams hours stay consistent. If you normally go green at 8:30am UK time, keep doing that. Don't suddenly appear at 4am because you're keeping local hours.
- Call backgrounds. Use a virtual background or a consistent real one. Tropical birds through an open window will raise questions.
- Have a story. Not a lie, just a reason you don't need to explain. "Working from home this week" covers most situations. Nobody checks.
I covered the full detection breakdown in a previous post. Five layers, and the human stuff is where most people actually get caught. The technical side is solvable. Discipline is the hard part.
Day one abroad
You've landed. You're in the hotel or Airbnb. Here's the order:
- Find the internet source. Ideally an ethernet port or a router you can plug into. If there's only wifi, your travel router can handle that too (repeater mode)
- Plug the travel router into the internet source. Power it on. Wait 1-2 minutes for the VPN tunnel to connect
- If you're on Apple devices, turn off iCloud Private Relay (Settings > Apple Account > iCloud > Private Relay > Off). Private Relay routes some traffic through Apple's servers instead of your tunnel
- Connect your laptop to the travel router via ethernet. Turn off your laptop's wifi
- Open whatismyip.com. It should show your UK home IP
If it does, you're done. The whole process takes about five minutes.
If something breaks
90% of issues are fixed by power cycling the travel router. Unplug it, wait ten seconds, plug it back in, wait two minutes.
If that doesn't work:
- Check the travel router's admin panel. Is the VPN showing as connected or disconnected?
- If disconnected, try reconnecting manually from the admin panel
- Some hotel networks block the default VPN port. If your setup has a fallback port configured, switch to it
- If nothing works, ask whoever's at your home to power cycle the server. That fixes most server-side issues
Don't panic. Most problems are connection drops that fix themselves with a restart. The tunnel is designed to reconnect automatically.
The thing people forget
You can get the technical setup perfect. UK IP, clean network fingerprint, consistent latency. And then post a sunset photo from a rooftop bar on a Wednesday evening — on an account your colleagues follow.
The technology is the easy part. It's a few hundred quid of hardware and an afternoon of setup. What actually protects you isbeing boring. Same hours, same patterns, same background on calls. The less interesting your work day looks from the outside, the better.
I've seen people with solid technical setups get caught because a colleague saw their Instagram story. Or because they mentioned it to one person who mentioned it to another. The risk isn't living your life abroad — it's letting work and personal overlap where colleagues can see it. The checklist isn't just hardware and software. It's habits during work hours.
Bottom line
Test before you leave. Bring the right hardware. Keep your work habits consistent. The setup works. The risk is the human side — but only during work hours on work-visible channels. Your personal life, your personal devices, off the clock? That's yours.
Every time I travel I run through this exact list. The technical checks take twenty minutes. The human checklist is the one worth thinking about for the whole trip.