I'm Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Women Leaving Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email about a media tour I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about fitness, 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 deleting it, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere new, 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 physician and used to be a Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been clear all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the most rapidly expanding travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have families, they have busy social lives, they have spouses, 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 very interested in trekking, cycling, kayaking, all the things that partners are unlikely to be aligned on in their interest. 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 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 European restaurant on her own, and even though I tease her for this often, 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.