How Women In Their 50s & 60s Are Redefining Independent Travel

Solo female travel has shed its romantic narrative. What was once considered brave – backpacking adventures or post-divorce epiphanies – is now simply how independent women choose to journey. The sharpest rise is among women in their 50s and 60s: financially secure, professionally successful, and unwilling to compromise on where they go or how they travel. Whether seeking solitude or connection, they’re redefining what it means to explore the world alone, finds Kerry Smith.

The Rise Of Solo Female Travel

One of the most wonderful afternoons of my life happened on an autumn day in New York. It was freezing, I was jetlagged, and because I was travelling solo, I gave myself permission not to rush off to see Campbell’s Soup Cans at MoMA or march along the High Line. Instead, I did very little. I was staying at The Marlton Hotel, just off Washington Square Park, which feels like the kind of New York hotel that belongs to another era – dim lighting, worn velvet, marble-topped tables. The tiny rooms, with their dark wood panelling, made the city outside feel even bigger. I sat by the fire in the lounge, eavesdropped on the conversations drifting around me and read The Goldfinch while slowly making my way through a bottle of Burgundy.

Of course, travelling alone does not necessarily mean being alone. There was the time I travelled solo to a bush camp in South Africa, delighted by the prospect of several days entirely in my own company. On my first night, however, the whole camp headed up a nearby mountain for a starlit dinner, which would have been utterly magical had the staff not felt sorry for me and assigned a bewildered 21-year-old as my dinner companion. Once we got past the initial awkwardness, though, we had a great evening. That is the other unexpected pleasure of solo travel: the conversations you would never otherwise have.

A New Generation Of Travellers

For a long time, solo female travel was framed as an act of bravery or reinvention: the territory of backpackers and post-divorce Eat Pray Love epiphanies. Increasingly, though, it feels less dramatic. The sharpest rise in solo travel is among women in their fifties and sixties: women who are financially independent, successful, and no longer willing to compromise on where they go or how they travel.

Debbie Flynn, co-founder of the luxury women’s travel club Club Avandra, says the shift is about far more than holidays. ‘Women are more confident and ambitious now. They want to do things on their own terms,’ she tells me. Increasingly, she believes, women are looking for ‘a new community’ – people outside the fixed circles of partners, school-gate friendships and long-established routines.

Part of the appeal lies not simply in solitude, but in novelty: new conversations, new perspectives and temporary connections formed outside everyday life. ‘You realise you know everything there is to know about each other,’ Flynn laughs of one long-standing friendship group. ‘What’s really interesting is the energy of talking about your lives and interests totally separately.’

Flynn launched Club Avandra after suggesting a trip to the Galápagos to her husband, who promptly told her to go with friends instead. ‘But either they didn’t want to go or couldn’t afford it,’ she says. ‘And I suddenly thought: why should the fact that my friends or family don’t want to go stop me?’

She believes many women are reaching a similar point, which is the idea behind Club Avandra’s small-group trips for women travelling independently: independence without isolation. The appeal of this kind of ‘solo together’ travel, she argues, is that it offers both freedom and companionship: the chance to disappear for an afternoon into museums, cafés or a good book, then reappear later over dinner, swapping stories with women from entirely different worlds.

Intrepid Travel has launched new women-only expeditions, including to Peru.

The Many Ways To Travel Solo

None of the Club Avandra trips feel particularly Eat Pray Love. Instead, author Kathy Lette will be leading women along sections of the Camino de Santiago before ‘wine-soaked lunches’ in Galician vineyards; and the Finnish wellbeing pioneer, Marja Putkisto, will be touring Helsinki for slow Nordic living, saunas and cold-water swimming. Intrepid Travel has meanwhile launched new women-only expeditions in Peru, Cambodia and Bhutan, including trekking the Himalayas and tuk tuk tours in Siem Reap with all-female crews.

But not all solo travellers are looking for company. In Costa Rica, the SOFIA Network connects women with female-led guides, hotels and experiences, whether that means surfing on the Nicoya Peninsula or heading deep into the jungle lodges of the Osa Peninsula. Japan, meanwhile, with its immaculate trains, tiny vinyl listening bars and the world’s most normalised culture of eating alone, offers the rare luxury of solitude without self-consciousness. In Kyoto, travellers can spend an afternoon learning the meditative art of Zen raking with Sone Zoen, the landscaping house behind the gardens of the city’s most celebrated Buddhist temples – the kind of absorbing, left-field experience that feels particularly suited to solo travel.

And for the solo travellers who really do want to be alone, retreats such as Kabn on Loch Fyne are reimagining solitude itself: charred-larch cabins, wild swimming, wood-burning stoves and long evenings where the only real commitment is deciding whether to light the fire.

The Real Luxury Of Solitude

The real luxury of solo travel isn’t isolation so much as the freedom to follow your own instincts for a while – to wander into a bar you hadn’t planned on visiting, to fall into strange conversations with people you would never otherwise meet or spend three hours reading Donna Tartt in a hotel lounge by a fire because nobody is waiting for you to get moving.

Perhaps that is why I still think about that afternoon at The Marlton Hotel: the fire, the burgundy, the snow outside, and the pleasure of having absolutely nowhere else to be.

Kerry Smith is Country & Town House’s Travel Editor-at-Large.