I'm Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Solo

A few weeks ago, I received an message about a press trip I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Although 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 hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would actually be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it emerged 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 intending to and without going anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the woman traveling alone, 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 females. They have households, they have hectic 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 doing it alone. People are very interested in hiking, biking, paddling, all the things that partners are least likely 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 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 reach this point. My stepmother, who is totally modern in every way, would get arrested 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 trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.