I'm Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Women Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Alone

A couple of weeks back, I got an email about a media tour I would not countenance. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have entailed a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. Although I liked those activities, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to think what that would really 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 other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is extremely 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 demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are females. They have families, 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 unlikely to be aligned on in their interest. If anyone is also tired of taking teenagers to the wonders of the world, 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 mystery is why it’s taken so long to get here. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get arrested 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 trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.