I am Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Women Leaving Their Family – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email about a press trip I would never countenance. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have entailed a lot of exercise and early nights. Even if I enjoyed 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 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 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 extremely fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without intending to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator stated that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are women. They have families, they have hectic social lives, they have spouses, 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 adventurous the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are big into hiking, cycling, paddling, all the things that couples are least likely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired 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 puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. My stepmother, 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 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.