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

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email about a press trip I would not 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 activities, 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 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 emerged they meant the other Zoe Williams, the one who is a physician 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 arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the female solo traveller, between 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 families, 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 adventurous the travel, the more people are doing it alone. People are big into hiking, biking, kayaking, all the things that partners are unlikely to be aligned on in their interest. If anyone is also sick 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 mystery 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 European restaurant on her own, and even though I mock 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.