It all started as a lark. For Nabila Ismail, it began as a single year’s reprieve from the corporate world—a sabbatical, deliberate and finite in its ambition. But her future soon unfurled into something altogether more expansive: a life redesigned around community, through a business born from wanderlust and sheer nerve. Today Ismail presides over the Dose of Travel Club—a richly curated South Asian collective bringing together men and women who share an appetite for discovering the world in the company of like-minded adventurers. The club’s portfolio reads less like a travel agency’s brochure and more like a love letter to the curious and the courageous: Carnival in Barbados, an Afrobeats festival in Ghana, the ancient rhythms of Iraq, the textile-rich streets of Pakistan. Each departure is an invitation; each itinerary, a quiet act of revolution. Before she found her calling with her club, Ismail moved through worlds—pharmacy and technology—with the restless intelligence of someone who suspects that the best version of her story hasn’t been written yet. Four years ago, almost despite herself, she became an accidental entrepreneur. The detour became the destination. “It was my lifelong dream,” recalls Ismail of her deep desire to travel. “I thought I wanted to do it for one year before the pressure of getting married, getting tired and older, and not having the same interests. The whole plan was to go back into tech.”
THE BRIDGE BETWEEN
To understand the full weight of what Ismail has done—and continues to do—it’s important to understand the world she stepped out of. A second-generation American of Pakistani heritage, she grew up navigating the exquisite tension of two cultures: one that celebrated ambition within prescribed parameters and another that demanded she venture beyond them entirely. Solo travel, for many women of South Asian descent, is not merely unconventional—it is subversive. It disrupts a carefully maintained social order, a quietly inherited script in which a woman’s movements are understood to be communal, sanctioned, and chaperoned. Ismail did not tear up this script so much as she began, incrementally and with great deliberateness, to write her own.
Her first act of quiet defiance was a university education, living on campus, hours from home—a seemingly ordinary rite of passage that, within the context of her family, was nothing short of seismic. “I was the first one in my entire family, girl or guy, to go live on campus, four or five hours away, and once I realized I could do that, that was already bashing a stereotype.”
From there, Dose of Travel began as something far more intimate—a personal platform, a digital diary of solo wanderings that attracted, with remarkable swiftness, a niche audience of women who recognized themselves in her story. The virality, when it came, arrived through TikTok and a particular cultural moment. “I started travelling as a desi girl over 10 years ago, and no one else like me was travelling as often back then, and so I garnered this desi audience from the very beginning. It was my personal page, the name, and it actually went viral from the TikTok trend during peak Covid times. It was called Travel Boyfriend, and I was looking to just use it to find a travel friend that was also desi. I tested it out with my first trip to Bali, and it sold out within a day.”
THE ARCHITECTURE OF COURAGE
There is a question that hovers over every woman who has walked a similar path: how does she shed the accumulated weight of expectation? How can she begin, when beginning itself has been rendered so thoroughly difficult? Ismail’s answer is disarmingly philosophical, and perhaps all the more powerful for it. “For me, it was realizing that this is my life and reminding myself that I have to be the one to live with the decisions, not anyone else,” shares Ismail. “Also reminding myself that it’s everyone’s first time living on this planet, and so my parents are only going off of what they know, which is inherently so different because they didn’t even grow up in this country. They’ve never seen this before, and it comes from a place of fear, and they just want the best for me, but they don’t know what the best is because nobody can know.”
UP NEXT WITH DOSE OF TRAVEL
To travel with the Dose of Travel Club is to submit, willingly, to a form of curation that is both expert and deeply personal. Ismail understands that her community skews toward first-timers—women stepping into their independence with borrowed confidence and men eager to explore on their own terms—and she calibrates accordingly: the landmark institutions alongside the more off-the-beaten-path excursions, the celebrated alongside the overlooked. “We also have destinations that are just not for everyone,” explains Ismail. “We did an Iraq trip, and usually people who come on an Iraq trip are well-traveled. They want something different but don’t want to go alone. We did Ghana for an Afrobeats music festival. We have a Pakistan trip coming up. We did a Barbados trip for Carnival—a lot of Soca music, dancehall, and wearing a full costume that not everyone’s going to want to wear. So we have different niche trips, and it’s for different kinds of travelers.”
THE FIRST STEP
For the woman standing on the precipice of her first solo departure, Ismail prescribes a dose of pragmatism alongside the romanticism: choose a city where a language she knows is spoken, take a weekend trip close to home, and acclimatize to her own company before surrendering to the uniquely exquisite fun of the unfamiliar. “Try eating out alone,” says Ismail. “Try spending a whole day with your thoughts. I started off in Europe, in Spain, because I was learning Spanish at the time. Anywhere in Europe, I feel like it would be really good, and it’s also really well-traveled, very common for solo travelers. As for my favorite experiences, my top ones are Lebanon, South Africa, and Pakistan.” And for those who wish to take that first step in the company of kindred spirits, there is always the club itself—a sanctuary, Ismail insists, entirely free of judgment. “Definitely come in learning about yourself. Because we’re all Desi, we generally know what it’s like. It might be your first time traveling. Maybe it’s your first time going into the ocean. Maybe it’s your first time doing a lot of these things because you didn’t grow up with that. So the whole judgment thing is out the window.”
“FOR ME, IT WAS REALIZING THAT THIS IS MY LIFE AND REMINDING MYSELF THAT I HAVE TO BE THE ONE TO LIVE WITH THE DECISIONS, NOT ANYONE ELSE.”
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