You booked the trip alone. You’re not the only one. That’s the whole idea behind solo travel for women.
Women now make up a massive segment of solo travellers worldwide. And the loudest growth isn’t twenty-somethings backpacking between hostels — it’s women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond, finally booking the trip they’ve been circling on a map for years.
Here is what nobody tells you before you hit ‘book’: solo does not have to mean alone. It can mean independent. It can mean unaccompanied by a partner, a friend group, or a spouse who was never going to want to go anyway. And it can still mean landing at a guesthouse in Reykjavik, or a lodge in the Serengeti, or a cabin on a ship crossing the Drake Passage — and finding a small group of other women there who packed their bags for the same reason you did.
That’s what we build at Wild Women Expeditions — thirty-five years of small-group trips, run by women, for women, built around the things you actually want from travel: maybe a new skill, a place that changes how you see things, independence and connection.
How Many Women, Exactly?
Search interest in solo travel has been climbing for years. Women are driving nearly all of it — recent reporting puts women at 71 percent of all solo travellers globally.
Women in their late 40s are showing up for solo travel more than ever — and women 50+ and older are leading the way. More time, more clarity about what they want, more say over how they get there.
And a specific version of solo is leading that shift: the women-only group trip. Women have figured out that you can travel without a companion and still not travel without company.
Solo Doesn’t Have To Mean Alone.
Alone is eating dinner in a hotel room because you did not want to sit at a restaurant table by yourself. Unaccompanied is choosing your own trip, your own pace, your own reasons for going — and then showing up to find eleven women at that dinner table who understand exactly why you came.
We hear the same story on nearly every departure. A woman signs up by herself. She’s a little nervous the week before. By day two, she’s hiking beside a stranger. By day five, that stranger isn’t a stranger anymore.
Most Wild Women Expeditions trips run small on purpose — small enough that no one gets lost in the crowd, small enough that your guide knows your name by day one. It’s the difference between a big tour and a women’s-only small group trip.
35 Years of Getting This Right
Trends move fast. Trust takes longer to build, and it does not come from a single season.
Wild Women Expeditions has been running and empowering women-only, women-guided adventure trips for more than 35 years — hiking in Iceland, safaris in Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda, kayaking in Baja, small-ship expeditions to Svalbard, Antarctica and the Arctic, horseback trips, cultural immersion journeys into Bhutan. The common thread through all of it is not the destination. It is the same operating premise we started with: women travel differently when the group around them is entirely women, and that experience is worth building a company around, not just a category within one.
That distinction matters more than it seems. Plenty of travel companies added a women’s departure once the demand got too loud to ignore. We’ve been women-only from the start — not a category we added, but the company we’ve always been. Every guide, every itinerary, every group size decision has been built by women, for women, from the beginning. We believe in empowering women and the communities they travel through. A woman deciding where she goes, how she gets there, and who leads her there — that’s not a bonus feature. That’s the whole point.
Thirty-five years also means the parts you never think about until something goes wrong — the guides who know this terrain, the outfitters and lodges we’ve worked with for decades, the quiet trust built over years of doing this again and again. None of it is being figured out in real time. It was built a long time ago, on trips very much like the one you’re considering now.
What This Actually Looks Like on the Ground
You land in a country you have never been to. Maybe you do not speak the language. Maybe this is the first trip you have taken since a divorce, a retirement, a birthday with a zero on the end of it. You are met not by a stranger holding a sign, but by a guide who has run this route dozens of times and a group of women who are, within a day or two, going to know your name, and the reason you signed up.
By the middle of the trip, the itinerary starts to matter less than you thought it would. What you remember is the woman from Ohio who told you the real reason she came. The guide who spotted fresh tracks in the dirt and named the animal before anyone else had even looked down—the nine women who met four days ago who had already given each other nicknames.
That is the part solo travel statistics cannot capture. The data tells you why women are booking alone. It does not tell you what happens once they arrive.
Solo Group Travel For Women- Choosing Your First Trip
If this is your first time booking a trip by yourself, the question is rarely “am I brave enough.” It is closer to “what kind of solo do I actually want?”
Some women want a trip built entirely around movement — a demanding hike, a multi-day paddle, a horseback route through open country. Others want something slower: a cultural immersion journey like Bali, a small-ship expedition with long days at sea, a safari with hours in a vehicle for conversation to unfold.
Neither is more solo than the other. Both put you in a small group of women who booked alone and arrived anyway.
Is solo group travel safe for women?
Safety is one of the top concerns solo women travellers name before a trip, and it is one of the reasons women-only group travel exists in its current form. A small group, a women’s guide who knows the terrain and the culture, and a fixed itinerary planned months in advance address the specific worries — walking alone at night, navigating an unfamiliar language, being stranded without support — that make solo travel feel riskiest. Age is not the variable that matters here. Structure is.
Do I need travel experience to book a solo trip like this?
No. Trips range from moderate walking itineraries to demanding multi-day treks, and each one lists the physical expectations plainly before you book. First-time solo travellers and women who have done a dozen international trips end up on the same departures, because the guide adjusts the pace to the group in front of her, not the other way around.
Will I be the only one travelling alone?
Unlikely. Most women on a Wild Women Expeditions trip booked solo. That is the premise of the trip, not an exception to it.
The Trip You Have Been Circling
You can book this on your own terms. No one else’s yes required.
Thirty-five years in, we have learned that showing up alone was never the hard part. Finding your people once you’re there — that’s what we build. The community is what you leave with.
