I learned this the hard way.
A few years ago I was three months into Southeast Asia with two small children when I had a health crisis — and no one I trusted to watch them. I went through every childcare app I could find. I didn't trust a single one. That moment is the reason Travel Sitter exists.
But there's a smaller, quieter problem underneath the safety one, and almost every parent knows it: the search itself is exhausting.
The hidden second job
Think about what finding a sitter actually takes today.
You post an ad. You get a flood of replies — most of them wrong for you. You sort through them one by one. You open page after page of profiles, trying to read between the lines of a smiling photo and three sentences. You message the ones who seem promising. Some never answer. You follow up. You compare. And at the end of all that, when you finally pick someone, you still don't really know who's about to walk into your home and be alone with your kids.
It's hours of work. And it lands on the people who have the least time to give: parents who are moving, traveling, working, or just trying to get through a hard week.
The sitters have their own version of this. They apply into the void. They never know if a family is serious. They spend energy chasing leads that go nowhere.
Everyone is doing a lot of work, and no one feels safer at the end of it.
Why it's broken
The system pushes all the sorting and all the verifying onto the two people least equipped to do it — the parent and the sitter. The platforms in the middle mostly just host the listings and step back. Vetting, when it happens at all, is shallow. (Plenty of well-known platforms have learned this publicly and painfully.)
So you get volume instead of trust. More profiles, more replies, more noise — and no one actually checking who these people are.
What we do today
Travel Sitter flips the work.
You send us one request — what you need, when, in which language. We do the rest by hand: we match you with sitters we've already vetted, and we send you the profiles that fit. No ad to post. No hundreds of replies. No guessing.
And "vetted" means something specific here: verified identity, a criminal background check (Bulletin n°3, re-checked every six months), an in-person interview, verified diplomas, experience and references, and first-aid certification. Eight out of ten applicants don't make it through. That's the point.
This is a real human — me — doing the matching, for now. It's slower than a button. It's also the reason you can actually trust what lands in your inbox.
Where we're going
This is the beginning, not the finished thing.
The direction is a marketplace — something closer to Airbnb, but built around safety instead of bolted onto it. A place where parents see profiles already sorted for their needs and their specific request, and can book a vetted sitter directly, on the app and the site. Same radical vetting underneath. Just faster, smoother, and available the moment you need it.
I'm building it as a mother who needed exactly this and couldn't find it. One verified sitter, one family at a time — until the search stops being a second job for anyone.