I'm Prepared to Become Part of the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Alone

A few weeks back, I got an email about a media tour I would not countenance. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early bedtimes. Although I liked those activities, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was hitting delete, I started to think what that would actually be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to please 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 other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor 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 intending to and without going anywhere, I've entered the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, aged 45 to 60. One travel company stated that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, they have busy 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, cycling, kayaking, all the things that couples are unlikely to be aligned on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of dragging teenagers to the world's marvels, 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 puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get detained before she’d go into a Belgian 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 occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.