Equipment for People Who Are Always Travelling: A Practical Guide for HR Teams With No Fixed Address to Ship To

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TL;DR

• Equipment for constant travellers is what you do when the person has no stable address to ship anything to.
• Delivery is the obvious problem. Repair and retrieval are the harder ones.
• The usual fix is a nominated fixed address plus a specification that reduces how often anything needs to be shipped at all.
• Three groups: genuinely nomadic, regularly mobile with a home base, and seasonally relocating.
• Choose based on whether there is a stable address anywhere, not on how much they travel.
• Done well they get the same equipment as everybody else, just routed differently.

A new starter in a sales role is going to spend most of the next year in hotels. The onboarding form asks for a delivery address. They give one for a flat they're leaving in three weeks. The laptop is ordered, arrives after they've gone, and sits in a hallway for a month before anybody works out where it is.

The shapes repeat. A company employs somebody who moves between three countries on a rotating basis and cannot say in advance where they'll be when a replacement is needed. Another has a field engineer whose laptop fails in a market where the warranty provider has no presence. A third has somebody leave while abroad, with the device in a different country from the person's registered address and no obvious way to collect either.

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The real issue isn't the shipping. It's that the entire equipment operation assumes a stable address, and for a small number of people that assumption is false in a way no form captures.

When You Don't Actually Need to Change Anything

Stage one: they travel but have a home base. Most "constant travellers" do. There's a flat somewhere, a family address, or a partner's place, and equipment goes there. This covers the majority and needs nothing more than asking the right question on the form.

Stage two: friction appears. Deliveries arrive when they're away, a repair takes six weeks because the machine had to travel to the person and back, and nobody can say with confidence where the device is. Nothing is broken and it costs an hour of somebody's time each occurrence.

Stage three: it's a liability. A device whose physical location is unknown, held by somebody who moves frequently, with no address against which anything can be delivered or collected. At departure that becomes a real problem rather than an administrative one.

Stage four: genuinely no fixed address anywhere. A small group, often by choice, and the only group that needs a different arrangement rather than a different routing. Worth designing for explicitly because improvising per person produces inconsistent outcomes.

What HR Teams Actually Need from an Arrangement

> "Where do we actually ship?" > Ask for a nominated address that will remain valid, not a current address. > Those are different questions and the standard onboarding form asks the wrong one.

> "What happens when it breaks?" > Decide in advance whether the fix is shipping a replacement, a local repair, or a spare the person already holds. > Repair is the failure most likely to leave somebody unable to work for weeks.

> "How do we get it back?" > Settle this at the start, while the relationship is good and somebody is willing to answer. > Retrieval from a traveller is the hardest collection in any fleet.

> "Should the specification be different?" > Usually yes, and in specific ways rather than generally. > Battery life, weight and durability matter more here, and a dock at a nominated address matters less.

> "What do they do about peripherals?" > An allowance works better than shipping, because a monitor is not going anywhere useful.

A sixth question applies to anybody crossing borders regularly: does the device need anything to move with it? Carrying a company laptop across borders repeatedly raises questions about documentation and customs that are specific to the markets involved, and the person should not be discovering them at a border.

The Three Groups and What Each One Needs

Regularly mobile with a home base. What it is: substantial travel, a stable address somewhere. What it needs: ship to the base, specify for portability, and expect delivery timing to need coordinating around trips. Where it goes wrong: when the form captured where they happened to be rather than where things should go.

Seasonally relocating. What it is: predictable moves between two or three locations, often for months at a time. What it needs: one nominated address regardless of where they are, plus planning so shipments land in windows when they're there. Where it goes wrong: when a replacement is ordered to the location they're about to leave, which is the single most common failure here.

Genuinely nomadic. What it is: no stable address anywhere, moving every few weeks. What it needs: a different arrangement rather than a different route. Usually a nominated third-party address, a specification chosen so failure is less likely, and an accepted longer replacement window stated honestly. Where it goes wrong: when the company pretends the standard process applies and then improvises each time.

My recommendation is to handle all three the same way: ask for a nominated stable address at the start, specify for durability and battery rather than for desk use, and write down what happens on failure. The nomadic group then needs one additional decision about what the nominated address actually is.

How to Decide What to Do: Five Questions

Is there a stable address anywhere? This is the question that sorts people into the three groups, and it isn't the same as asking where they live. A family address, a partner's flat, or a friend who'll accept parcels all count.

How long is the longest gap between moves? If it's three months, you have a window to ship into and the problem is scheduling. If it's three weeks, shipping to where they are doesn't work at all, and you need a fixed nominated point that holds regardless of where they happen to be.

What is the replacement window you can actually honour? Work it out rather than hoping. For somebody nomadic it may be two weeks, and saying that clearly at the start is better than discovering it during a failure.

Can they hold a spare? For a small number of people, issuing a second device is cheaper than the alternative. If somebody's work stops entirely when a laptop fails and the replacement window is two weeks, a spare machine pays for itself the first time.

Who holds the local knowledge? Somebody who travels constantly knows more about shipping to the places they go than anybody in your office does. Ask them where things can reliably arrive rather than telling them, and write the answer down somewhere the next person equipping them will find it.

Six Platforms Worth Knowing

RemoAsset Best for: delivering to and collecting from addresses in markets where you have no presence, which is the core of this problem. Why companies choose it: procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries with each device tracked from issue through return, which matters most for a travelling population because the record is the only thing that knows where a device went. Published pricing from $1,499 a year on the Subscription tier for companies with 50 to 5,000+ employees, including a 60 per cent reduction on retrieval charges, and retrieval from a mobile person is the single hardest collection in any fleet. It's our own product, so weigh that accordingly. Where it struggles: no network discovery, so a device whose holder has moved three times is tracked by its record rather than by observation, and the record is only as good as what people report. No software licence management. And only the Subscription tier publishes a figure, with pay-as-you-go quoted.

Workwize Best for: holding stock so a replacement can go out immediately rather than being ordered. Why companies choose it: own warehouses, which shortens the replacement window that matters most here. Where it struggles: publishes no rate card. The figures on its pricing page are savings claims rather than prices. Live domain is goworkwize.com.

Firstbase Best for: the initial equipping, particularly at volume. Why companies choose it: strong supply side, clean subscription shape. Where it struggles: publishes nothing on price, and retrieval is the weaker half, which is the part a travelling population needs most.

GroWrk Best for: populations spread across many markets with different requirements in each. Why companies choose it: flexible arrangements rather than one package. Where it struggles: no rate card, and its pricing page runs a competitor cost estimator producing its own estimates.

allwhere Best for: handing the routing problem over entirely. Why companies choose it: managed service, low internal lift. Where it struggles: publishes nothing, so comparison requires a conversation.

Deel IT Best for: companies whose travelling people are employed through Deel in various markets. Why companies choose it: hardware alongside employment, MDM and support included. Where it struggles: publishes no price for IT, and its own page states both 130+ and 150+ countries without reconciling them, which matters more than usual when your people are in unpredictable places.

The Decision Table: What Actually Needs Deciding

Row three is small and consumes the most attention.

Ask for a Nominated Address, Not a Current One

This is the single change that fixes most of the problem and it's a wording change on a form.

Standard onboarding asks where somebody lives, or where to send their equipment, and both questions get answered with wherever they are at the moment. For most people that's stable. For a traveller it's a hotel, a short let, or a flat they're leaving.

The question to ask instead is narrower: give us an address where post will reliably reach you for the next two years, even if you aren't there. That reframes it completely. People answer with a family home, a partner's place, a long-term friend, or sometimes a service address they maintain for exactly this purpose.

That address then becomes the equipment address and nothing else changes. Deliveries go there. Replacements go there. Warranty exchanges go there. Collections come from there. The person collects their machine from the nominated address at a point that suits them, which may be three weeks after it arrives, and that's fine because the parcel is somewhere safe rather than in a hotel that has never heard of them.

Two details to confirm when you set it up. That whoever lives at the nominated address knows parcels may arrive and is willing to accept them, because a nominated address that nobody told is just a different kind of failure. And that it's reviewed, because the arrangement is only good while it's true, and a nominated address from three years ago may belong to somebody's ex-partner.

For the genuinely nomadic, the nominated address may need to be something you provide: a partner's warehouse, a company address in their nearest market, or a third-party receiving service. That costs something small and removes the entire category of problem.

Specify for the Life They Actually Have

The second lever is the hardware itself, and it's underused because device standards are usually written for people at desks.

Battery life matters more than anything else. Somebody working in airports, trains and cafés is routinely away from power for longer than an office worker ever is, and the difference between six hours and eleven is the difference between planning around power and not thinking about it.

Weight matters second, and in a way that compounds. Every extra few hundred grams is carried every day for years, and people who travel constantly notice it in a way that desk-based colleagues never do. It's a specification choice with a real quality-of-life effect.

Durability matters third and is the hardest to specify, because it's rarely a published figure. What you can do is choose the sturdier option when there's a choice, and budget for a good case rather than treating it as an accessory somebody can expense.

Connectivity is worth considering explicitly. A device that can take a mobile connection directly, or a reliable separate mobile hotspot, removes the dependence on whatever network happens to be available. For somebody whose work involves calls from unpredictable places, that's often the single most valuable item in the kit.

And consider the power arrangement. Multi-region plugs, a universal adapter, and a charger that works across voltage ranges are small things that each cause a lost morning when missing.

What matters less, and should be dropped from the standard build for these people, is anything that assumes a desk. A monitor, a dock, a full-size keyboard and a chair are all the wrong items for somebody who will never use them, and the budget is better spent on the things above or given as an allowance.

Repair Is the Real Failure Mode

Delivery gets planned for. Repair is what actually leaves somebody unable to work for weeks, and it's the part most arrangements never consider.

The problem is structural. A warranty repair usually means sending the device somewhere and getting it back, and both legs assume an address the person will be at. For a traveller, that's a six-week round trip in the best case, during which they have no machine, and in the worst case the repaired device is returned to a place they left a month ago.

So the answer for travelling people is generally not to repair. Replace. Ship a machine from stock to the nominated address, deal with the broken one separately on whatever timescale suits, and accept that this costs more per incident than a warranty claim would. It is still far cheaper than six weeks of somebody not working.

Which makes the spare pool the thing that matters. A replacement that can ship the same day turns a failure into a few days of inconvenience. A replacement that has to be ordered turns it into three weeks. For a population where this happens predictably rather than occasionally, holding stock is the intervention with the clearest return of anything on this page.

For a small number of people, issue a second device outright. It's the right call. If somebody's work stops entirely when their laptop fails, they're in unpredictable locations, and your honest replacement window is two weeks, then a spare machine in their bag costs less than the exposure. That's a decision worth making deliberately rather than as an exception somebody negotiates.

Local repair is worth exploring in markets people visit often. Ask early. It won't be covered by a central warranty arrangement and it may be faster by weeks, which is a trade worth making for an urgent failure. The thing to avoid is discovering this option during the incident.

Retrieval Is the Hardest Part and Should Be Agreed First

Getting a device back from somebody who travels constantly is the most difficult collection in any fleet, and the time to arrange it is the day you issue the machine.

The difficulty compounds three ways. The person may be in a country with no connection to their nominated address. They've left, so they have no particular reason to be available for a courier. And the device may genuinely be with them rather than anywhere findable, which means the collection depends entirely on their cooperation and timing.

What works is agreeing the route at issue. Not at exit. One line in the equipment acknowledgement saying that on leaving, the device goes to the nominated address or to a stated alternative, with the company arranging collection from there. That converts a negotiation at the worst moment into a reminder of something already agreed.

What also helps is making it easy. A prepaid, pre-addressed return arrangement that the person can use from wherever they are, with no need to find a courier or pay anything, removes most of the friction. People generally want to return equipment and are defeated by the logistics rather than by unwillingness.

Timing deserves flexibility. Somebody who leaves while three weeks into a trip cannot return a device immediately, and insisting produces a stalemate. An agreed date, even one a month out, is worth considerably more than an immediate demand that gets ignored and then escalated into something nobody wanted.

And accept a higher loss rate for this group. Some devices won't come back, and the honest planning assumption is that retrieval from travellers succeeds less often than from anybody else. Build that into the equipment budget rather than treating each instance as a failure to investigate.

Where Jurisdiction Comes In

Several things about travelling employees are not equipment questions and need proper advice.

Whether somebody can work from a given country, what their presence there means for them or for the company, what tax or employment consequences follow, and how any of it interacts with their contract all differ by jurisdiction and by circumstance. None of that is settled by an equipment policy and an equipment policy should not imply an answer.

Carrying equipment across borders has its own requirements that vary by route: what documentation a laptop needs, whether anything must be declared, and what happens if it's queried. Ask locally for the routes somebody actually travels, and give the person whatever documentation they need before they need it.

Anything raised on health or accessibility grounds goes to whoever handles that rather than through this route.

What's portable is the rest. Ask for a nominated stable address. Specify for battery, weight and durability rather than for a desk. Replace rather than repair. Agree the retrieval route at issue. Hold stock so the replacement window is short. None of that needs legal advice, and all of it is what makes the difference between a working arrangement and a series of improvisations.

The Kit List, Item by Item

The page argues for specifying differently. Here's the actual list, because a principle about portability produces a different outcome from a specification somebody can order against.

The machine. The lightest option that does the work, with the longest battery in that range. Where there's a choice between processing power and battery life, battery usually wins for this group, because the work is normal work done in unusual places rather than heavy computation.

A case, specified rather than expensed. A proper padded sleeve or a bag with a dedicated compartment, chosen by you and included in the build. Left to an allowance it becomes whatever was convenient, and the case is the single item most responsible for whether a machine survives three years of airports.

Power: two chargers, not one. The second charger lives in the bag permanently and is the cheapest insurance in the whole list. A traveller who leaves a charger in a hotel has lost a working day; a traveller who leaves a charger in a hotel and has a spare has lost nothing. Add a multi-region adapter and check the charger handles the voltage range in the markets they actually visit.

Connectivity. Either a device with a built-in mobile connection or a separate hotspot, with a data arrangement that works across markets rather than one that needs a local card each time. For somebody taking calls from unpredictable places this is often the item that makes the difference between a working day and a lost one.

Audio. A good headset with a microphone, specified rather than left to preference, because calls from noisy places are the defining feature of this working pattern and a laptop microphone in an airport is unusable.

A compact second screen, optionally. A lightweight portable monitor is a real improvement for some roles and dead weight for others. Offer it rather than standardising it, and let the person decide after a month of actually travelling rather than before they have started.

What to leave out: desk monitor, dock, full-size keyboard, chair. Convert that budget into an allowance the person can spend wherever they actually settle, if they settle anywhere.

The whole list costs more than a standard build for a desk-based worker, and less than the peripherals it replaces. It usually comes out roughly even, which is the useful thing to know before asking anybody to approve it.

I'd specify the second charger even where budgets are tight. I've seen somebody lose a working day in Lisbon over a charger left behind in a hotel in Porto, which is 13 euros of equipment set against a day of a senior person's time.

The Device Record, When Location Is Unknowable

Travelling people are where asset registers fail fastest, and it's worth being explicit about what accuracy even means here.

For a desk-based worker, the register holds a location and that location is true. For somebody who moves every three weeks, a location field is false almost immediately, and a register full of confidently false entries is worse than one that admits what it doesn't know.

So record something different for this group. The nominated address, which is stable and is where the device will eventually return from. The person, which is the thing that's actually true. And a flag marking them as mobile, so that nobody reads the nominated address as a statement about where the device physically is today.

That flag does real work at three moments. During an audit, it explains why a confirmation query needs a different approach. During a security incident, it tells whoever is responding that the device's physical location is not known from the record and has to be established from the person. And at departure, it signals that the retrieval needs the agreed route rather than the standard one.

Then confirm more often than for everybody else. A quarterly one-question check, asking whether they still hold the device and whether the nominated address is still right, costs the person thirty seconds and catches both of the things most likely to have changed. For a fleet with twenty travellers that's twenty short messages a quarter.

What not to do is chase location. Asking somebody where their laptop currently is produces an answer that's obsolete by the time it's recorded, and it reads as surveillance rather than administration. The useful questions are whether they have it and whether the return address still works.

One practical addition: ask them to photograph the serial number and keep it somewhere they can reach it. A traveller reporting a theft from a different continent cannot read a serial off a machine they no longer have, and the insurance or police process will want it.

When Somebody Travels Permanently and Then Leaves

The hardest case in this whole area, worth its own section because improvising it goes badly and it's entirely foreseeable.

The situation: somebody who has been travelling for two years gives notice while three weeks into a trip, with the laptop in a country unrelated to their nominated address, and a last working day that falls before they next land anywhere.

Four things make this manageable, and all four have to be set up beforehand.

The agreed route, recorded at issue, saying where the device goes on departure. This converts the conversation from a negotiation into a reminder, which matters because the person's cooperation is the only mechanism available.

A flexible date. Insisting on return by the last working day is unachievable and produces a standstill. An agreed date four or six weeks out, written down, with a reminder, works considerably better than an immediate demand that gets ignored and then escalated.

A prepaid return that works from anywhere, which means a label or a collection booking the person can arrange from whatever country they're in without paying anything or researching couriers. Most non-returns are logistics defeats rather than refusals.

And access handled independently of the hardware, on the leaving date, because the device may legitimately be in somebody's possession for weeks after they've left and the data should not be.

Then accept a higher loss rate and plan for it rather than treating each one as an investigation. Some devices from this group won't come back. The honest approach is to price that into the equipment budget, make the return as easy as possible, and spend the remaining effort on the agreed-route arrangement for the next person rather than on pursuing the last one.

Whether anything can be deducted, claimed or required when a device isn't returned differs by jurisdiction and by circumstance, and that's a question for advice rather than for a policy applied everywhere.

How Many People Are Actually In This Group

Worth establishing before designing anything, because the honest number is usually much smaller than the number of people who describe themselves as always travelling, and the design effort should match.

Three questions sort it. Does the person have an address where post reliably reaches them? Is the longest gap between moves more than about two months? And would a parcel sent to their stated address today actually be collected within a fortnight by somebody who knows to expect it?

Three yes answers means they are a normal employee who travels, and the standard process works with one wording change on the form. In most companies that covers the large majority of apparent travellers, including people who spend most of their week in hotels, because they still have a flat.

One or two no answers means they need the nominated-address arrangement and the travel specification, which is a small amount of extra work per person and no new process.

Three no answers is the genuinely nomadic group, and it is typically one to five people in a company of several hundred. That is the group worth designing for deliberately, and the small size is the point: you can afford a spare device, a third-party receiving address, and a per-person conversation for five people in a way you could not for fifty.

Counting matters because the design changes with the number. For five people, handling each individually with a written note of the arrangement is correct and cheap. For fifty, you need an actual process. Designing a process for five people is over-engineering, and improvising for fifty is how outcomes become inconsistent and how somebody ends up without a machine.

Recount annually rather than treating the list as fixed. People's circumstances change in both directions, and somebody who was nomadic for two years and has now settled should be moved off the exception list rather than left on it indefinitely.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

The direct costs are small: a redelivery, a replacement shipped twice, a device written off. Each one is a minor line and none of them is the problem.

The expensive failure is the weeks. Somebody whose laptop fails in the wrong place, with a repair-based process and no stock, loses most of a month of productive work. For a senior person in a revenue role, that single incident costs more than equipping them generously for several years, and it's entirely avoidable by holding a spare.

The second cost is the lost device. That for this group is a real rate rather than an exception. A machine held by somebody who moved four times and then left, with no agreed retrieval route and a nominated address that was out of date, is usually not recovered. Each one is written off individually and the total is never calculated.

Third is the register. Travelling people are where asset records go wrong fastest, because the device's location changes constantly and nothing observes it. A fleet with twenty travellers will have twenty entries that are confidently wrong, and they'll be the ones that matter during an audit.

Fourth is the quiet cost of specifying wrongly. Somebody carrying an unnecessarily heavy machine with mediocre battery life for three years is a small daily friction that nobody ever reports, and it's one of the few equipment decisions that affects somebody's experience every single day.

So the question worth asking isn't where to ship the laptop. It's what happens when it breaks in a country you've never shipped to.

When You're Ready to Move Beyond Handling Each Person Separately

The signal is the third traveller, because by then you've improvised twice and done it differently each time.

What replaces it is four things. A nominated-address question on the onboarding form, worded to ask where post will reliably reach them rather than where they live. A travel specification: better battery, lower weight, a case, a mobile connectivity option, and no desk peripherals, with an allowance instead. A replacement-not-repair rule for this group, backed by stock that can ship the same day. And a retrieval route agreed in writing at the point of issue rather than at exit.

Four items, one page, and it covers everybody from the occasional traveller to the genuinely nomadic with only the nominated address differing.

RemoAsset is our own product. So apply the appropriate scepticism. The relevant part is that both the delivery and the collection happen in markets you may have no presence in, with the device recorded against a person and a date throughout, which for a travelling population is the only thing that knows where anything is. It has no network discovery, so a device that's moved four times is tracked by its record rather than observed, and no software licence management.

If you have somebody travelling constantly right now, ask them today where post will reach them in two years. That one answer solves most of this.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ask where post will reach them in two years, not where they are this week.