I'm Prepared to Join the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Holidaying Solo

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email about a press trip I would never consider. It was overseas and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early nights. Although I liked those activities, I wouldn't have been eager 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 different, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Clearly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it emerged 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 intending to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company reported that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are females. They have households, 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 daring 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 in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired 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 tactful to mention it.

The real mystery is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My father's wife, who is completely 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 came to mind to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.