I am Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Family – and Holidaying Alone

A couple of weeks ago, I got an message about a media tour I would never countenance. It was overseas and it was about health, so it would have entailed a lot of exercise and early nights. Even if I liked those things, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to wonder 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 different Zoe Williams, the one who is a physician 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 meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel group: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, they have hectic 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 big into trekking, biking, paddling, all the things that couples are unlikely to be in agreement on in their interest. If anyone is also tired of taking 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 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 trace of it myself, to be this old before it even came to mind to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.