I'm Prepared to Join the Brave New World of Females Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Solo

A couple of weeks back, I got an message about a media tour I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. Although I enjoyed those things, I wouldn't have been eager 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 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 other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is extremely 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 woman traveling alone, 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 women. They have households, 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 daring the travel, the more people are undertaking it alone. People are big into trekking, biking, paddling, all the things that couples are least likely to be aligned on in their enthusiasm. If anyone is also tired of dragging 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 stepmother, 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 constantly, I must have had a vestige of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.