By Jeanne Whalen

Emily Panakos was feeling ready for a change after six years of hospital nursing in Florida, so she signed up for a gig that launched her on a cross-country adventure.

As a travel nurse, she worked monthslong stints in hospitals nationwide—and used her free time to explore. She went to jazz clubs in Chicago, skiing in the California mountains and boating on Lake Union in Seattle.

“It has changed my life in so many ways, brought me so many opportunities,” said Panakos, 35. She knew she’d chosen well during her first gig in Chicago, when she stepped out onto her skyscraper balcony and saw the city lights twinkling around her.

“I sent photos to my mom like, Mom, look! Because Chicago has a beautiful skyline and I was in the middle of it,” she said.

Nursing is hardly known as a glamorous profession. Long shifts, late nights and demanding patients take their toll. But traveling nurses, an increasingly popular segment of the profession, are giving the field a surprising allure.

Thousands of these nurses pack suitcases and catch flights each year to work monthslong stints in places with high demand. The job typically offers better weekly pay than a staff nursing role does, though with less job stability. It can also offer a taste of the jet-setting life, which some young nurses have started chronicling widely on social media—at times in posts sponsored by staffing agencies.

Their TikTok and Instagram posts are full of frozen drinks on the beach, group hangs with other travel nurses and fashion shots in colorful new scrubs. Travelers say they tend to bond with each other because they’re all new in town.

Panakos and other travel nurses are quick to point out the drawbacks, too. They are often scrambling to pin down their next contract. They don’t get paid between gigs and can, surprisingly, face difficulty maintaining healthcare benefits. Navigating each new hospital’s practices, personalities and computer systems can be challenging. And sometimes life is lonesome on the road.

Healthcare workers, including nurses, are in such high demand that healthcare is now the largest source of job creation in the U.S.

Travel nursing has been around for decades but exploded during the pandemic, when hospitals were desperate for staff. Hospitals have continued to hire travel nurses to fill in for employees taking leave, or to help cope with high demand, such as during flu season or when births spike in August, said Rose Fulton, vice president of recruitment at the staffing agency TNAA/TotalMed.

During the pandemic, hospital orders for travel nurses from her agency soared to a daily average of 25,000, she said. They’ve now fallen back to 8,000, which is still significantly higher than before the pandemic.

A hospital chain near the Jersey Shore sometimes taps travel nurses during tourist season, when accidents and trauma cases rise, said Carol Gioia, chief nursing officer at AtlantiCare.

Lately, nurse influencers on TikTok and Instagram have juiced interest among young people. Some of their content is organic and some is sponsored by staffing agencies that get paid by hospitals to match travel nurses with gigs.

Travel nurse Emma Larson says she has done a bit of both. In March, she was paid by a staffing agency to post a TikTok highlighting her trips to New York City and various beach locales while on assignment. “Travel nursing has given me incredible flexibility, competitive pay and the opportunity to experience new cities across the country,” she said in the clip.

Soon after arriving in Phoenix for her latest nursing gig this spring, Larson filmed an unsponsored TikTok for her followers while hiking in the red hills of Sedona.

“Let me just show you the view I’m looking at right now, strictly because I decided to be a nurse—specifically, a travel nurse,” she said.

Larson, a pediatric ICU nurse from Florida, brings her husband, a remote worker, on trips. Highlights have included touring the Adirondacks and seeing “Wicked” on Broadway.

She typically makes between $2,000 and $3,000 a week after taxes, compared with about $1,000 a week after taxes in her previous staff job, she said. The heftiest chunk of her pay comes from a nontaxable stipend travel nurses earn to cover their living expenses.

There is a hitch, though: To keep the stipend money tax-free, nurses must pay rent or a mortgage on a permanent residence somewhere. Larson maintains a permanent home in Florida and gets short-term rentals during her assignments but figures she still comes out ahead financially. Other nurses say it can be hard to find affordable housing during assignments.

For many, sunny West Coast states are the goal. Gracie Schulte, a 27-year-old who grew up in Iowa, spent nine months in Hawaii last year on three back-to-back travel contracts, sharing frequent TikToks about swimming with sharks, skydiving and island hopping.

“It was basically beach every day and hiking every other day,” Schulte said in an interview. Her Hawaii posts were unsponsored, though Schulte has created other paid content that nurse staffing agencies have posted to their own social-media feeds, she said.

Staffing agencies sometimes provide travel nurses with health insurance during a contract and for up to a month afterward, if a nurse wants to take a break between gigs. Nurses who take longer breaks usually lose coverage. The instability can be stressful, nurses say.

Other hassles include hospitals sometimes canceling contracts at the last minute, even after a nurse has arrived in town, said Rachel Altum, who helps run a Facebook group and an annual conference for travel nurses. Bad landlords and tension with permanent staff nurses can also mar the experience, she said.

The lifestyle isn’t just for 20-somethings. Yvonne Greer, 68, started traveling 22 years ago so she could see the country and take summers off to spend time near her grandkids in Michigan.

Brandy Pinkerton, 44, had a child while she was a teenager so didn’t get a chance to travel until her son went off to college. “I had never left my hometown,” she said. “I really just wanted to get out there and see the world and meet new people and have adventures outside Texas.”

She has completed 27 assignments over the past decade, including in Montana, where she so loved the landscape that she bought a home near Glacier National Park.

Some locations are less glamorous. Logan Lee, a Kentucky resident, has worked several stints in northern Wisconsin, where the pay is high but the temperatures are low. He bought a dog to keep him company. “Travel nursing is nice and stuff, but it does get lonely. ” he said.

Eventually, many travelers yearn to put down roots again. Panakos, the nurse from Florida, is taking a break from the circuit after several years because it was tiring to be on the road, she said from her home in Tampa. “People don’t see how difficult it can be to leave your family, to have to meet new people all the time and put yourself out there.”

While some travel nurses squirrel away the extra money to pay off debt or buy a home, Panakos left it all on the field.

“I lived it up,” she said. “I did it for the experiences.”