I'm Prepared to Join the Emerging Trend of Women Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Alone

A couple of weeks ago, I received an message about a press trip I would not consider. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have entailed a lot of physical activity and early nights. Although I enjoyed those activities, 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 actually be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be amazing. 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 TV Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without going anywhere, I've arrived in the most rapidly expanding travel demographic: the female solo traveller, between 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are females. They have families, they have hectic social lives, they have partners, their world is absolutely lousy with people they could go on holiday with – and that’s why they (we) need a holiday on their own.

The more adventurous the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are big into hiking, cycling, paddling, all the things that partners are unlikely to be aligned on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of dragging teenagers to the wonders of the world, just to watch them be on their phones and answer questions such as “how much longer do we have to be here?”, they are too tactful to mention it.

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