If you’ve ever attempted a long-haul flight with children under the age of five, especially on your own, you’ll know there’s a point, somewhere deep into a 24-hour flight, when you hit the wall.
Lone parents will actually be able to go to the bathroom. You might manage to scarf a couple of airline meals. And, oh holy grail, you might just get an hour or two of sleep en route- Helen Raine
The children have slept, but not simultaneously, and just when they are espresso-style awake, the need to snooze overwhelms you.
Of course, you can’t; the children are now jumping off the walls after a day and a night of confined spaces, so when the red crayon slides down the side of the seat never to be seen again and the last pot of apple puree bursts with the pressure, the tantrums that ensue can be on an epic scale. Your chance of catching a few zeds are nil.
Well, weary parent passenger, if you know only too well how this feels, then JulieMelnick is about to bring you salvation from infant Armageddon. She has had an idea so inspired yet obvious that I can’t believe no one has thought of it before: a match-making service for parents and nannies on the same plane. It’s www.nannyintheclouds.com.
The premise is simple. Once parents book their flights, they sign up to the website for free and input their travel arrangements. Likewise, the potential nanny enters their flight details and voila, the two are matched up and an alert goes out to both.
All that remains is for the parent to pay the website €7.50 for the nanny’s contact information, talk to the nanny to make sure they won’t be harder work than the kids and arrange how much to pay (the site recommends between €7.50 and €15 an hour).
The nanny will also have two references available. Parents then contact the airline to ensure that everyone is seated together.
The nanny can meet the family at check-in to help with the horrors of shoe-off-shoe-on-bottle-tasting security and boarding.
Once on board, it isn’t compulsory to book the nanny for the whole journey, meaning that parents save some money and nannies get some down time (although they’ll be stuck next to their charges, so their chances of total peace are fairly slim).
The only fly in an otherwise awesome ointment is that there are gazillions of flights at any one time and presumably only a relatively small quota of nannies signed up on them, especially in Europe.
So nannyintheclouds is adding a function whereby parents can search a range of dates or city pairings before booking flights to see when a nanny is available. This would vastly improve the chances of a family booking a flight with a nanny onboard and vice versa.
Imagine actually finding a nanny! You’ll board the plane with the ultimate luxury of an extra pair of hands when you would be otherwise outnumbered by children.
Lone parents will actually be able to go to the bathroom (this is effectively impossible unless you want to risk putting a toddler on the unspeakably dirty floor).
You might manage to scarf a couple of airline meals. And, oh holy grail of the travelling parent, you might just get an hour or two of sleep en route.
And for nannies of course, there is the huge bonus of getting paid to sit on a plane, which you were going to do anyway.
In my backpacking youth, I’d have jumped at the chance to make a couple of hundred euros just for helping out with someone’s children. For older nannies, it’s a chance to get a grandmotherly fix of children and help out a harassed mum or dad.
The service only works of course if enough people sign up and it’s early days yet. But with the new search function and a dose of good luck, instead of a long haul being a glimpse into the jaws of hell, nannyintheclouds could see you circumnavigatingthe globe in blissful harmony with youroffspring.
You, and a whole plane load of passengers, will be forever grateful.