I'm Ready to Become Part of the Brave New World of Women Vacationing Without Their Family – and Traveling Alone

A few weeks ago, I received an message about a press trip I would never countenance. It was overseas and it was about health, so it would have involved a lot of exercise and early bedtimes. 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 hitting delete, I started to wonder what that would really be like: being somewhere different, without anyone to accommodate except myself, without anything to do except exactly what I wanted. Clearly, it would be amazing. So I said “yes” and it turned out they meant the other Zoe Williams, the one who is a doctor and used to be a TV Gladiator, and is incredibly fit already, and yes, in hindsight, that should have been clear 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 females. 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 adventurous the travel, the more people are undertaking it alone. People are big into trekking, biking, paddling, 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 mystery is why it’s taken so long to reach this point. My stepmother, who is completely modern in every way, would get detained 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.