Georgie Powell has been piecing together school holiday childcare for four years now and has tried a number of options – holiday clubs, grandparents, and even a holiday nanny – but the inconsistency and level of organisation left her with a splitting headache.
Looking for an alternative that wouldn’t compromise her and her husband’s busy workloads, but also that their three daughters would enjoy, she found a solution in 2023.
She found a travel programme that offered summer education for children aged over one, accommodation and access to a co-working space; in destinations like Portugal, Greece, Italy, Indonesia, Montenegro and Spain.
Boundless Life enables the family to have a holiday – and work at the same time – but it does come with a hefty price tag. Those working must also be able to do so remotely.
For Georgie and her husband, this worked. They immediately signed the family up for the company’s six-week programme in the medieval city of Sintra, Portugal, not far from the capital, Lisbon. They spent part of July and all of August working from Sintra.
Georgie can work remotely as VP of partnerships and strategy for productivity management app, Freedom, while her husband can be remote, depending on the client, as a corporate electric vehicle consultant.
Their daughters, then aged seven, five and two, were occupied during the week in the education programme, and the family spent weekends together exploring Sintra’s famous palaces and castles, and the nearby golden beaches of Cascais.
They found the programme so memorable and, above all, enjoyable, they didn’t think twice about signing up again. This time, they will be swapping their Somerset home for four weeks on the Greek island of Syros in August.
“We honestly had the time of our lives. It couldn’t have been better. We wanted to have a summer adventure, but both my husband and I work full time, so how do you manage that, with the responsibility of work?” says Georgie.
“We’d had previous summers where we tried to piece together childcare for our kids here, and it just felt so unfulfilling, and also quite stressful. This way, we had six weeks of peace of mind knowing that the children were going to have really fun days every day, and we could work.”
The package does come with a premium price tag of €14,600 (around £12,360) for four weeks in Syros for a family of five. This is broken down into €2,000 per child for the education programme, €7,400 for a three bedroom apartment in Syros’ capital, Ermopouli, plus €600 per parent for “Boundless services”, which includes a co-working space, events, and concierge-style access to the team.
Georgie and her husband rationalise this in a number of ways. They find the education programme cost comparable with the private school and nursery fees they pay in the UK.
Last summer, they made their family home available for short-term rentals while they were in Portugal, which Georgie says ended up covering the cost of the Sintra programme. Bookings for August this year have ended up covering around 60 per cent of the Syros trip.
But Georgie and her husband see it as more of an investment in both their careers and their children – especially considering the gap between the average annual leave policy of five weeks, and the average 13 weeks of school holidays a year.
“You have to invest in childcare to maintain your progression at work, and we both have really fulfilling jobs that we want to keep. The peace of mind is worth so much, just to be able to know that your kids are having an amazing experience every single day, and you can just get on with your job. It’s quite hard to put a price point on that,” says Georgie.
“Even though we were still working, it was so refreshing to be somewhere different. We had so much more free time as all the business of our usual life just dropped away, and we had all these wonderful, spontaneous moments with the other families in the program. It was a really special summer.”
‘I want our children to experience different cultures’
Like Georgie, Sendi Young and her husband Danny have also tried multiple summer childcare options for her now seven and ten-year-old sons. The most notable was two years ago. The children spent the summer staying with Sendi’s parents in Istanbul, Turkiye, where she is from, and attended a local English-speaking holiday club. She and Danny stayed in and worked from a nearby apartment, as they are both able to work remotely.
They also did a six-week programme last summer, in Syros. This August, they will be participating in Boundless Life’s four week programme in Kotor, Montenegro.
As they are currently renting their home, they can’t advertise it as a holiday rental, but Sendi and Danny have also rationalised the cost – €10,700 (around £9,058) for the family of four – by comparing it to spending two weeks in a luxury hotel in somewhere like Menorca, which comes to around £13,000.
“You can do that, but then your holiday is over. I felt like by doing this, we could feel like we were on holiday for four weeks, and have lots of smaller holidays by being on the beach or going away at the weekend,” says Sendi, who works full-time as a senior leader for a fintech company, while Danny is a sales director.
“I also feel like the holiday camps they were doing end up being very similar, and the kids come and go. It’s really nice to be able to get our kids to experience a different culture, art, and history, and build deep bonds with different kinds of kids who are all very international – I can’t even measure that in money.”
Travel programmes vary in cost
There are now many other family travel programs that also allow parents to work, that come in at a slightly lower price point.
Family Workation has built several co-working and co-living spaces in Portugal that connect families with their preferred local childcare option, like au pairs, babysitters or nannies for stays of a week to 90 days.
Meanwhile, Nomad To Be has established partnerships with property rental platforms and Montessori schools to create family workation experiences in Porto, the Algarve, Lisbon, and Esmoriz, lasting a month to a year.
During their summer tour of Italy, Croatia and Slovenia, Olivia Tilley and her husband John will send their two children to The Field School of Hvar for a week in August, at a cost of €390 for half days for both. Four weeks’ full time for two children would come to €3,120.
Accommodation and co-working space isn’t currently on offer, but the school plans to introduce that next year. Next summer, the Tilleys plan to spend two months in Bali, sending their children to the Empathy School. Olivia and John also rent out their home to cover the costs of their trips.
Childcare, however, isn’t the main motivator for Olivia and John. For previous summer trips, Olivia has taken unpaid leave from her role as an executive assistant, while John gets the summer off as a teacher.
“I love the idea of alternative learning. With AI coming more into our lives, kids who can think creatively are going to be in a better position. So I want them to have more project-based learning, rather than the static, Victorian style of traditional school,” says Olivia.