ticket for one

Women are driving a boom in solo travel, shrugging off company and compromise to take transformative trips alone. Have you booked your ticket for one yet?

compiled by: meena alexander

Answers on a postcard: what does your dream holiday look like? Do you picture yourself lolling on a white sand beach, a suncream-smudged Zadie Smith in hand and the surf tickling your toes? Maybe you’re more of an adventurer, hiking up hills and diving into crystalline waterfalls. Perhaps filling your days with art galleries and affogato in cobbled piazzas is all you really want. Daydreaming about our next getaway never gets old, but one major thing has disappeared from our travel fantasies over the last three years: other people. Where once we might have felt uneasy about going it alone on our annual leave, today whisking yourself off is an aspirational act of independence, with the growing #solotravel community swapping tips and sunset snapshots that have inspired us all to chase our own experience. “The appetite for solo travel has skyrocketed since 2020, with bookings for single rooms up significantly and Google searches quadrupling,” says Tim Hentschel, CEO of booking site HotelPlanner. It’s one of the industry’s fastest-growing markets and women are driving the boom, making up an estimated 84% of solo travellers. The rise, Hentschel believes, was born out of multiple lockdowns when we were forced to become comfortable