Around the world in lap of luxury

But as befits someone who has been arranging foreign trips for the best part of 40 years – during which time she has had brushes with the KGB and been trapped by an avalanche on the harsh steppes of the Tibet-China border – Pamela Nicholson is unruffled.

The 69-year-old's days of extreme adventures may be behind her – she stopped doing art tours two years ago – but she is not contemplating retirement.

The luxury properties she manages may be in headline-grabbing foreign lands but they are a long way away from the natural disasters and political antagonism.

Private Properties Abroad remains as strong as Mrs Nicholson herself. The firm, based in Whixley, North Yorkshire, saw its sales dip slightly in 2009 but has more than bounced back this year despite the air of economic gloom that hangs over Europe.

Twenty-four years after it was set up, PPA turns over 1.5m. It has seen an increase in last-minute bookings this year and has even sold out some properties for next summer.

Those properties – 78 of them across the Mediterranean but also in Thailand, Morocco and Haiti – are not hotels or guest houses. They are houses, villas and chateaux and often second homes which PPA rents out while the inhabitants are away.

They are filled, in bookings of a week or longer, with affluent holidaymakers who want peace, security and, above all, privacy. Her tenants are high-end and have even included a group containing Princes William and Harry.

"We were so pleased that last year we were only five per cent down (on 2008). People were really falling by the way-side. This year we are really happy with the way things have gone. It is quality bookings if not quantity," Mrs Nicholson said.

France and Italy have been popular this year – perhaps because tenants alarmed by the ash cloud or BA strikes know that, if necessary, they can get home by road and rail.

Most of PPA's clients are looking to rent out their homes at times between April and October, and Mrs Nicholson, as well as her staff, which include her daughter, Deborah Bigley, spend much of the rest of the year visiting the properties and assessing potential new ones.

This is because the firm is offered new places each year and they have to be checked before they are added to the roster. Others drop off the list, either because the owners have other plans for them or because their standards are dropped, and Mrs Nicholson politely withdraws.

"A reputation is too precious to jeopardise. We are still visiting all the time and have maintained all the same high standards."

"Tenants value their privacy – that is the one thing they look for. We even have few who have escaped the football World Cup in South Africa and come to France.

"Some tenants are going back this year for the eleventh time. Really we feel it is as much their home as anybody's."

Mrs Nicholson said that in nearly a quarter of a century of filling properties abroad, she has never had tenants who have severely damaged a home. "We are in a small niche which probably relies more heavily than most on recommendations."

Each property has a housekeeper and many also have a cook, chef, administrator of gardener.

A LIFETIME OF ADVENTURE

Pamela Nicholson settled in Whixley, near York, but has crossed Britain and much of the world in her lifetime.

As a girl, she lived with her family and studied in Buenos Aires before continuing her education at Rodean School, in Brighton – alumni include Dame Cecily Saunders and MP Sally Oppenheimer – and at finishing school near Lausanne, in Switzerland.

Her long career arranging trips abroad began in the 1970s, when she started providing guided art study tours and made several visits

to Communist Russia and Central Asia.

On her first trip to Russia, she was escorted by Prince Galitzine, related through his mother to Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian ruler who was shot in 1918. Her adventures beyond the Iron Curtain were memorable for being continually followed by a black-coated KGB agent.