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

A couple of weeks back, I received an message about a media tour I would not consider. It was long haul and it was about fitness, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Even if I enjoyed those activities, I wouldn't have been desperate to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was deleting it, I started to think what that would actually be like: being somewhere new, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Plainly, 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 intending to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the fastest-growing travel group: the woman traveling alone, aged 45 to 60. One tour operator stated that nearly half (46%) of their reservations are now people going alone, and 70% of those are women. They have households, they have busy 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 tactful to mention it.

The real puzzle is why it’s taken so long to get here. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get arrested 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 came to mind to travel solo. Now I just have to go somewhere.