I'm Ready to Join the Emerging Trend of Women Leaving Their Family – and Holidaying Alone

A couple of weeks ago, I received an message about a press trip I would never consider. It was long haul and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of physical activity and early nights. Although 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. Plainly, it would be incredible. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the different Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a Gladiator, and is extremely fit already, and yes, in retrospect, that should have been obvious all along.

So, without meaning to and without traveling anywhere, I've arrived in the most rapidly expanding travel group: the woman traveling alone, between 45 to 60. One tour operator stated 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 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 trekking, biking, kayaking, all the things that couples are unlikely to be in agreement 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 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 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 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.