I am Prepared to Become Part of the Emerging Trend of Females Leaving Their Family – and Traveling Alone

A couple of weeks ago, I received an message about a media tour 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 enjoyed those activities, I wouldn't have been eager to spend a week with other people who liked them. But even as I was hitting delete, 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. Plainly, 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 Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been clear all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the most rapidly expanding travel demographic: the woman traveling alone, between 45 to 60. One tour operator reported that nearly half (46%) of their bookings are now people going alone, and 70% of those are women. They have families, 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 undertaking it alone. People are big into hiking, biking, kayaking, all the things that partners are unlikely to be in agreement on in their enthusiasm. 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 puzzle is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My stepmother, who is totally modern in every way, would get arrested before she’d go into a Belgian restaurant on her own, and even though I tease her for this often, 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.