I am Prepared to Become Part of the Brave New World of Females Vacationing Without Their Loved Ones – and Traveling Alone

A few weeks ago, I received an email about a press trip I would never consider. It was overseas and it was about fitness, so it would have entailed 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. Clearly, 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 extremely fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel demographic: the woman traveling alone, 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 females. They have households, they have hectic 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 very interested in hiking, biking, kayaking, all the things that partners are least likely to be in agreement on in their interest. If anyone is also sick of dragging 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 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 trace of it myself, to be this old before it even occurred to me to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.