You’ve spent eight hours a day with this person for a year. You know her coffee order, her commute, maybe even her partner’s name. What you don’t know is what she’s like at hour eleven of a trip, after the kids are finally down, when the day doesn’t have a clock to end it. That’s the part nobody mentions before you book the extra flight. Bringing a nanny on holiday isn’t really about logistics, even though it looks that way on the surface. It’s about taking a relationship that has clear edges every weekday and putting it somewhere with no edges at all, while also working out whether the person you’re bringing is staff on a work trip, a guest on a holiday, or something that sits uneasily between the two. Families who’ve done it well didn’t figure that out by accident. They worked it out early, said the awkward things out loud, and built the trip around boundaries instead of hoping the boundaries would hold themselves.
Before you book
The conversation that matters most happens before anyone packs a bag, and the first thing to settle is the one families most often skip: this is your vacation, not hers. However warm the relationship, however much she loves your kids, a multi-week trip is still a work trip for her, just in a nicer location. Pay should reflect that. Her normal rate for her normal hours is the floor, not the ceiling. Travel days count as paid time, including the flight and any layovers. Most families add something on top for the inconvenience of being away from her own home, her own bed, her own life, often a flat amount per night somewhere in the range of fifty to two hundred dollars depending on how demanding the accommodation is, whether she’s sharing a room with a child, and how much she’s actually working versus simply being present. Lay all of this out before you book, not after you land, because nothing sours a trip faster than two people quietly resenting a number neither of them said out loud. If you’re using a travel planner to help piece together flights, accommodation, or local logistics for a trip this size, a good family travel agent can factor an extra adult and her schedule into the planning from the start rather than bolting it on afterward.
If she’s never travelled with you before, that’s worth mentioning too. A brand new nanny brought in specifically for the trip is a different gamble than someone who already knows your kids’ rhythms. A child who hasn’t bonded with someone at home won’t suddenly bond with them in an airport, and the families who’ve learned that the hard way have ended up doing all the parenting themselves anyway, just with an extra person and an extra set of flights to manage on top.
Room privacy and setup
Where everyone sleeps shapes the whole trip more than people expect, and on this one the advice is close to unanimous. Give her a separate room and bathroom, not shared with the kids, even if it costs more. It isn’t really a luxury. A nanny who shares a room with the children she’s been minding all day has no actual break, and you don’t get one either, because she’s still half on duty just by being in the room. If a two-bedroom setup or an Airbnb with shared common space is what the budget allows, that can work fine too, as long as her room is genuinely hers once the day is done. A trip where neither adult ever gets to drop the performance of being pleasant starts to wear on everyone, kids included.
There’s a second kind of privacy worth thinking about too, which is less about her space and more about yours. Having someone else in the house every day for three weeks, even someone you trust completely, changes the shape of family time in a way a normal working week doesn’t prepare you for. Some families keep her genuinely separate outside working hours, joining for activities when invited but otherwise having her own evenings. Others fold her in close, eating most meals together, because that’s the relationship they already have. Neither is wrong, but it’s worth deciding which one you actually want before the trip starts, rather than discovering three days in that you’re missing something you didn’t know you’d lose.
Time Off That Actually Feels Like Time Off
At home, the job has a shape. It starts, it ends, she leaves. On a trip, all of that disappears, and “off duty” can quietly turn into “technically off duty but also in the room next door if anyone needs anything.” Set defined working hours before you go, ideally close to her normal day rather than something open-ended, and build real time off into the schedule the way you’d build in a flight time. A few hours most afternoons, or a full day or two over a longer trip, protected and specific rather than vaguely promised. Some families give the nanny a heads-up on the plan a day or so ahead rather than the whole itinerary at once, which keeps things flexible without leaving her guessing about when she’s actually free.
Then protect that time once it’s set. Don’t knock on the door for a minor thing during her two hours off because it’s easier than handling it yourself. If you wouldn’t interrupt her on a Tuesday off at home, don’t do it in a hotel either. It’s also worth planning for the days right after you’re back. Coming home from a long trip and walking straight into a normal work week is hard on anyone, and a guaranteed day to recover, even though she was “on vacation,” tends to matter more than people expect.
Setting Expectations With Your Kids
Kids notice when the rules change, and a trip changes a lot of rules at once. Their nanny is suddenly sleeping down the hall instead of leaving at six, which can make them cling harder to her, or alternatively to you, in ways that surprise everyone involved. Some kids treat the unfamiliar setting as licence to test limits with whichever adult feels softer in the moment, which can land oddly if it’s not you. Talk to your kids beforehand about what’s staying the same. Bedtime is still bedtime. Manners are still manners. The adults are still a team, even somewhere new. You don’t need a big speech, just enough that the trip doesn’t become the moment they discover they can play one adult against the other in a hotel room three time zones from home.
It’s also worth being honest about what you actually want from the trip. Some families bring a nanny so they can step back and get real downtime, an adult dinner, a morning that isn’t built around a toddler’s nap. Others want help on hand for the logistics while still doing most of the parenting themselves. There’s no wrong answer, but expecting one and getting the other is where a lot of the quiet frustration on these trips actually starts.
When It's Working (and When It's Not)
You’ll know early whether the arrangement is holding up, usually within the first 48 hours. It’s working when everyone, including her, seems lighter by day three rather than more drained. It’s working when she takes her time off without you having to remind her to, and comes back actually rested. It’s working when the kids are happy to see both of you, not clinging exclusively to whoever feels like the easier option that day. It’s not working if she’s started apologising for taking breaks, if the lines between her job and her holiday have blurred so much neither of you can name them anymore, or if you find yourself avoiding a conversation because you’re worried it’ll sound ungrateful. It’s also not working if you’re quietly doing most of the childcare yourselves anyway, just with someone else’s flights and meals to pay for on top, which happens more than people admit, especially when the fit with a newer nanny wasn’t quite there to begin with. None of these are failures exactly. They’re signals, and the families who travel with help more than once are usually the ones who paid attention to the signals the first time and adjusted before the next trip rather than after it.
Bringing a nanny on a family trip can genuinely work, and for a lot of families it’s the difference between a holiday and a relay race. It just asks you to rebuild, on purpose, a relationship you’ve taken for granted at home, with the pay, the privacy, and the expectations said out loud rather than assumed. Get the basics sorted early, and the rest of the trip gets to be about everyone, including her, actually having a good time. If you’re already thinking about how the trip splits between the adults in the room, working out who covers what is worth sorting alongside this. And if this is the first time travelling with another adult in the mix, bringing grandparents along throws up a surprising number of the same questions.
