Professional nanny to wealthy families refuses to fly on private planes, negotiating travel terms in her contracts

Samantha Jordan, a 30-year-old professional nanny, works for millionaire and billionaire families and travels with their children to destinations ranging from Caribbean resorts to European capitals. She does not board private planes. It is a personal safety decision that she states from the first interview, and she says she will not give it up, even for an attractive job offer.

Jordan has worked as a nanny for twelve years, starting at 18 while attending university, and also specializes in newborn care and support for mothers after childbirth. Assignments can last two months in Europe or a week in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico; in other cases she works at her employers' residence and accompanies them on trips. Many of the families she interviews with are used to flying privately, so she makes her position clear at the outset. Some parents accept a compromise on transportation and others do not; she has already turned down one job because the family required regular private flights.

Among her reasons, she cites an episode her husband told her, when he flew on a private plane as a college athlete and felt during the flight that it was about to crash. She says she does not know the details, but the story stayed with her, and after researching air safety she concluded that commercial flights are preferable for her. She acknowledges that accidents are rare and does not claim that all private planes are dangerous or that jets always carry greater risk; she says she simply does not feel comfortable on board.

The usual solution is to travel separately. Some families have agreed to fly commercial with her, while others use their own jet and pay for her commercial ticket to the same destination, as happened on a vacation in Mexico. Travel arrangements are formalized in the contract. Before leaving she asks for the travel schedule, the children's needs, what she may bring and how luggage and equipment will be transported. She also asks who will be driving and will not get into a car with a driver she has not met. At the beach she does not go into water where she cannot see the bottom.

Jordan says setting boundaries also means addressing the power imbalance between wealthy families and domestic staff, noting that nannies may feel pressured to accept uncomfortable requests for fear of losing their jobs, and that close, almost family-like bonds can develop without erasing the professional role. After a recent plane accident in Florida, she posted several TikTok videos urging other nannies to set clear boundaries before accepting a job. She says many viewers had never considered the issues and some announced they would change their contracts.

For private aviation, the story is a reminder that the cabin is not only a purchase by the principal. Household staff, from nannies to assistants, often travel with the family, and each of them is a passenger whose willingness to fly affects how a trip is organised. Jordan's solution, a separate commercial ticket paid by the family to the same destination, shows that these cases are settled commercially and case by case, not by any common rule.

The practical consequence for operators and brokers is on the manifest and scheduling side. When a staff member declines to fly privately, the family's trip splits into two itineraries with different departure times, airports and luggage flows, and the children's care during transit has to be planned around that. A family that cannot accept this arrangement simply loses the candidate, as happened in the job Jordan turned down.

The accident in Florida that prompted her videos shows how a single high-profile event moves the conversation among people who are not themselves aviation buyers. Her account is one individual's stated preference and her own reading of safety information, not a statistic about private flying; the wider effect to follow is whether more household staff begin writing transport terms into their contracts, as some of her viewers said they would.