How We Both Travel as PTs — and Make It Work

The Question Everyone Asked Us

When my husband and I both decided we wanted to travel as PTs, the first response from everyone — friends, family, our separate recruiters — was some version of: "Is that actually possible?" Both of us in the same field, trying to land contracts in the same city, at the same time, on the same 13-week cycle. It sounded complicated. It was complicated. But complicated is not the same as impossible, and a mentor helped us see that.

What We Tried First (and Why It Didn't Work)

Our first approach was to each work with our own separate agencies and try to coordinate independently. The problem: our recruiters were great individually but didn't talk to each other, didn't know each other's inventory, and had no real mechanism for coordinating a dual placement. We came close to a city match on our first attempt and ended up four hours apart — a tolerable situation for 13 weeks, but not the plan.

Getting Matched with a Mentor

We found the mentorship program through a travel therapy Facebook group. We specifically asked to be matched with someone who had experience with couple or family travel. We were connected with Chris W., a PT who had been traveling with his family for five years.

Chris's approach to our situation was immediate and practical. The key insight: treat both placements as a package and communicate that clearly to any agency you work with. Not "we're hoping to be in the same area" — but "we are a dual-PT placement and we need an agency that has the network to actually make this work, or we need to know that upfront."

The Agency Question

Chris recommended we consolidate with one agency — ideally one that had significant staffing presence in the markets we were targeting — rather than running parallel searches with two separate agencies. He'd seen couples get into complicated situations where Agency A had a perfect placement for one person but nothing for the other, and the coordination became stressful and fragmented.

He suggested we look for agencies where the recruiter explicitly had experience placing dual-traveler couples and was willing to hold both placements contingent on finding a geographic match. Most large agencies won't do this. Smaller, more relationship-focused agencies sometimes will. ProTherapy was one he mentioned specifically as flexible with dual placements — they'd done it before and were honest about what was and wasn't feasible in given markets.

Four Contracts, Same City

We've now completed four contracts together, all within commuting distance of each other. Our current placement has us both in the same metro area — different facilities, different settings (SNF for me, outpatient for him), but the same apartment we found on Furnished Finder and split a lease on.

The financial math of two traveling therapists in a shared housing situation is, frankly, remarkable. We're both pocketing housing stipends while sharing one place. We've paid off roughly $40,000 in combined student debt in 18 months of traveling together.

It took one conversation with a mentor who'd already figured out the dual-travel framework to get us from "is this even possible?" to making it actually work.