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Women travel alone more than men. Here’s why.

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Women are taking more solo vacations.
Of the 151 countries Jessica Nabongo has traveled to, 47 of them have been solo trips. In her quest to be the first black woman to visit every nation in the world, sometimes she’s had to go it alone. But this isn’t something she minds.
“The thing is when you travel with people, you’re not trying to meet new people — you are focused on exploring places with your friends,” she says. “Whereas when I’m traveling alone, I’m much more inclined to meet new people and I definitely make deeper connections with people in the countries that I’m visiting.”
Nabongo is one of many women who are embracing solo travel. According to a 2014 Booking.com survey, 72 percent of American women like to travel solo. Research company Hitwise found that the 55 percent solo travel searches in the United Kingdom are made by women, driven in particular by women ages 25-34 living in London.
You’ll find the most prominent manifestation of this trend on your Instagram feed: a slew of square frames, each holding a lone woman plus a Portuguese beach or a Colorado mountain top or an Indonesian hut. Women today have more means and fewer obligations than women of past generations. Logistically, travel is just more doable. But it’s not just increased access and time that have prompted women to travel, it’s the perception that travel is self-care. Taking a vacation is a shortcut to wellness and self-actualization, two things in which women are investing lots of time and money.
“Today’s women are inheritors of this concerted effort by a lot of women to travel more starting in the 18th century and onwards,” travel writing researcher Carl Thompson says.
In fact, the world’s earliest travel writings were produced by a woman named Egeria. In 381 AD, she climbed Mount Sinai on her pilgrimage from what is thought to be either Spain or Rhone Valley to the Holy Lands. The letters she wrote on her journey are regarded as the first travel memoir.
Although women are portrayed as fixtures of the home, Thompson says that historically there has been a gap between how much women have traveled and what has been recorded.
Travel wasn’t encouraged or acceptable for women, so many who did travel didn’t draw attention to it. “We’ve lost a lot of knowledge about what traveling women did because they didn’t advertise it,” he says. The lack of records led to the assumption that women didn’t travel, but historical findings about women like Egeria prove this wasn’t true.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, however, women were producing impressive travel writings. In 1857, Mary Seacole published one of the earliest autobiographies by a mixed-race woman, on her experience as a traveling nurse, titled Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. In 1890, journalist Nellie Bly documented her trip around the globe in a book inspired by the fictional novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly’s book was entitled Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.

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