I'm Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Alone

A few weeks back, I got an message about a media tour I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. Even if I liked those things, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Clearly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without intending to and without going anywhere, I've entered the fastest-growing travel group: the woman traveling alone, between 45 to 60. One tour operator stated that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people going alone, and 70% of those are females. They have households, they have busy social lives, they have partners, their world is absolutely full with people they could go on holiday with – and that’s why they (we) need a holiday on their own.

The more daring the travel, the more people are undertaking it alone. People are big into hiking, biking, paddling, all the things that partners are least likely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired of dragging teenagers to the world's marvels, just to watch them be on their phones and field questions such as “how much longer do we have to be here?”, they are too discreet to mention it.

The real puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. My father's wife, who is totally modern in every way, would get detained before she’d go into a Belgian restaurant on her own, and even though I mock her for this often, I must have had a vestige of it myself, to be this old before it even came to mind to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.