I'm Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Females Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Alone

A few weeks ago, I got an message about a press trip I would never countenance. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early nights. Although I enjoyed those things, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who enjoyed them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to think what that would really be like: being somewhere different, 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 TV Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've entered 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 travelling alone, and 70% of those are women. They have families, they have hectic 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 big into trekking, biking, kayaking, all the things that partners are unlikely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired of taking 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 discreet to mention it.

The real puzzle is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My father's wife, who is totally modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a Belgian restaurant on her own, and even though I tease her for this often, 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.