🇿🇦 LAST CHANCE! Save $150 on NomadWeek Cape Town (25-31 Jan). Early Bird Pricing ends at midnight.
Hi All,
Last week, I attended the SKIFT Global Forum, often referred to as "the Davos for travel," in NYC. I heard from CEOs of top players including AirBnB, Booking.com, Expedia, & Intrepid on their outlook for the future. I also met many new partners to discuss collaborative features & perks for our community. I realized at the event that most decision makers in these top companies have little to no understanding of our growing segment of Solo Travelers & Digital Nomads.
They're focused on short term quarterly results, rather than solving the problems that frequent travelers are facing day-to-day. And they're making decisions from boardrooms and 5-star hotels in major financial hubs, rather than from on the road, living the same lifestyle as their users. It makes me excited about Pangea's future as we continue to disrupt the space, while traveling full-time, exploring remote corners of the world with our community, and hearing every day from our users (like YOU) about how we can make Pangea even better.
📣 Key Announcements 📣
🇿🇦 LAST CHANCE to save $150! Early Bird Pricing ends TONIGHT for NomadWeek in Cape Town (January 25 - 31, 2026). This is going to be an EPIC kickoff to the 2026 Season & if you're coming to Cape Town, you won't want to miss it! Don't think of it as a conference - it's a 1 week community building event to help bring the much larger Nomad Community together in Cape Town this year! You don't want to miss it 😉
🕌 Central Asia this Spring - I want to go to Central Asia this Spring, and (so far) none of our partners have nomadic trips planned. I asked to see who else wanted to go, and 70 people opted in. Rough plan is mid April - mid July, spending 1 month working in each of 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan, 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan, and 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan, with weekend trips exploring each country, plus 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan and a roadtrip along the Pamir Highway in 🇹🇯 Tajikistan. Follow along for updates. And if you run a community that wants to run one of these locations...lmk 👀
✈️ 2026 Nomad Schedule Roundup! - With so many great community providers, our team aggregated the full schedule into the app, and in the digest below for 2025 & 2026. We'll start a separate Newsletter next month to share this list as it evolves & new programs continue to be announced with those interested to keep this one focused mostly on my Founder updates.
✅ PangeaVerified - Last updated we announced our Verified program, as a way to keep the platform focused on travelers meeting other genuine travelers. More than 150 members have been verified already. You can get verified by meeting us IRL, traveling with any of our Verified partners, or scheduling an interview for a one time $29 fee.
🌎 2026 Nomad Schedule Roundup 🌍
🇫🇯🇻🇺🇦🇺🇨🇦🇺🇸🇼🇸🇱🇰🇵🇪🇪🇸🇲🇽🇦🇷🇧🇿🇧🇷🇪🇹🇨🇴🇿🇦🇬🇹🇹🇭🇪🇬🇭🇺🇰🇪🇲🇦🇻🇳🇳🇦🇳🇮🇫🇷🇰🇭🇹🇷🇳🇿🇯🇵🇺🇾🇵🇹🇲🇺🇰🇷🇧🇭🇸🇦🇹🇲🇸🇨🇮🇹🇺🇿🇲🇹🇦🇲🇰🇬🇬🇪🇧🇴🇮🇳🇪🇨🇦🇱🇹🇯🇧🇬🇰🇿🇨🇭🇬🇧🇮🇪🇳🇴🇵🇦🇬🇷🇷🇴🇨🇻🇵🇭
I've written before about how much I value the experiences & connections that the best travel travel communities create. While there is always an option to solo travel somewhere for cheaper, arriving at the same time as a group, committing to the full month, and having other adventurous people around to instigate fun plans is a game changer. NomadWeek, WiFi Tribe, Nomad Nest, Noma Collective & Nomad Cruise are all known to do this for Digital Nomads working in different parts of the world. And Nomad Mania, Most Traveled People, and Extraordinary Travel Fest do this for Extreme Travelers who go more off the beaten path. See the full schedule for 2026 below with all the top retreats & events that we've collected below for you, taking the community to more than 70 countries! Submit a program here.
2025
October
🌏 South Pacific (🇫🇯 Fiji, 🇻🇺 Vanauatu, 🇦🇺 Austrailia, 🇨🇦 Canada, 🇺🇸 USA, 🇼🇸 Samoa) w/NomadCruise (12 Oct - 05 Nov)
November
December
2026
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
Have a program you'd like to submit? Let us know. Had an amazing or terrible experience on a program? Email me about it!
✅ Get Pangea Verified
As Pangea continues to rapidly grow with now more than 40,000 digital nomads & travelers who have downloaded our apps or joined our communities, we've introduced a verification process to help ensure people are connecting with genuine travelers, and keeping spammers away. To request verification, you can follow this link to request to join the community. There are 3 ways to get accepted:
👋 Ambassadors: If you've traveled with me, or one of our ambassadors, we'll add you straightaway. Just drop a message to the community with who you've met and where you met them and we will add you.
🤝 Partners: If you haven't met our team but heard of us through one of our Verified Partners, email [email protected] with a screenshot of your profile and a screenshot of a booking/membership confirmation from one of these programs along with a bit about you. We will review & add you or follow up for more information.
💬 Interview: If you haven't traveled with us or any of our partners, you can arrange an interview with our team. We charge a nominal, one time, $29 application fee to weed out spammers, and compensate our Ambassadors for their time.
Once you're verified, you'll get a badge on your profile, and have access to the exclusive verified community, group chat, meetups and more. We'll also be rolling out new features across the app to make it easy to find and connect with other Verified members around the world.
It's important I point out that we cannot be responsible for the actions of every verified member, and it's always important to exercise caution when meeting someone in-person who you don't know personally.
As always, we'll continue to build and improve, so let me know if you have any ideas!
Amazing to see community focused digital nomad groups, and extreme traveler communities planning trips to 70+ countries in 2026. Let's get to the rest of the 197! If you operate a program to somewhere new or exciting, I'd love to feature it in our newsletter.
And if you haven't gotten your NomadWeek or NomadSeason ticket yet, I really encourage you to do so. It's going to be a one of a kind event, bringing together everything we've learned from traveling with these top communities over the past decade, along with my / Andrae's combined expertise in Cape Town from both the perspective of a traveler and a local who both love exploring.
I was honestly skeptical last year thinking NomadWeek was just a big conference with lots of speakers all week. It’s not. It was the biggest nomad community building experience I’ve been a part of to date (200 people, which we’ll beat this year I expect), and was a blast. And it was 40% local - I met more South Africans during NomadWeek than the prior 3 years doing RY. It gets us out of our bubble of mostly Americans / other foreigners which is so important and we all should do more.
There are lots of ways to meet people in Cape Town, but NomadWeek goes a level deeper. I wouldn’t have agreed to co-host it if I didn’t think it would be amazing. You definitely won’t want to miss it, and frankly will just get FOMO later when things are sold out, so might as well get your ticket before prices go up in 24hrs 😉
Can't wait to see you there!
-Matt
Founder & CEO of Pangea
108/197 Countries (130 UN+) & 7 Continents Traveled
Join me & 250+ others at NomadWeek
