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

A couple of weeks back, I got an message about a media tour I would never countenance. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early bedtimes. Even if I liked those things, 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 new, 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 different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been clear 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 travel company stated that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people travelling alone, and 70% of those are females. They have households, they have busy 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 undertaking it alone. People are big into hiking, biking, kayaking, all the things that couples are unlikely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also sick of taking teenagers to the wonders of the world, 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 puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. 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 trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.