I am Ready to Join the Brave New World of Women Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Alone

A couple of weeks back, I got an message about a media tour I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have entailed 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 hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere new, without anyone to please except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, it would be amazing. So I said “yes” and it emerged they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is incredibly 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 most rapidly expanding travel group: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are females. They have families, 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 trekking, cycling, paddling, all the things that couples are unlikely to be aligned on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of taking teenagers to the world's marvels, 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 often, 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.