I'm Ready to Become Part of the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Holidaying Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I got an message about a media tour I would not consider. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early bedtimes. Even if I liked those things, 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 think 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 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 TV Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning 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 travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, 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 daring the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are very interested in trekking, biking, paddling, all the things that couples are least likely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of taking 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.