Inside the episode
Travel in the blood
Nadine's family were fairground people. Every summer they moved from town to town across Scotland, building up the waltzer and the dodgems. When she was five, her dad and grandfather built an indoor fairground called Pleasureland, and the travelling stopped.
Home felt grey after that. But once a year the family went abroad, and everything changed. The sun, the food, her dad relaxing a little. At 18 she went to Ibiza, then spent a year in Australia, working on a sheep station and travelling the east coast. She could be whoever she wanted to be.
The quiet one behind the scenes
Around 20 years ago, Nadine and her then husband, a former footballer, started a concierge company for Premiership players. He was the networker and the personality. She did the admin, the accounts and the systems, and at first didn't even feel confident picking up the phone.
Then she spotted that holidays were where the real value was. She taught herself to be a travel advisor on the job, made plenty of mistakes, learned the old blue-screen booking system and picked up everything she could from other agents on trips. Slowly, the travel side became hers.
The morning everything stopped
With all the focus on the business and none on the marriage, things started to unravel. One day in 2017, someone in the office asked her a simple question about a spreadsheet, and she couldn't breathe. It was her first panic attack.
"Over the years, I had stopped listening to myself," she says. No boundaries, working every hour, burnt out. Morning walks in the park helped. Watching leaves fall and go back into the earth, she realised nothing in nature is rushed. She didn't have to fix everything that day. Therapy followed, then the decision to leave, and in 2018 she set up her own company.
Stepping into the spotlight
For years Nadine dressed down and stayed low-key, even when visiting the world's best hotels. Then a WhatsApp group of women travel agents grew into the Travel Sisterhood, and she started to feel she had something to say.
Working on her personal brand with Claire, and on her style with stylist Clare Chambers, helped her outside match the person she had become inside. Now she wants to be a leading voice in transformational luxury travel, while slowing down enough to enjoy the life she has built.
