Married Women Increasingly Travel Solo: Tour Operators Adapt

18.12.2023 - 18:20 / skift.com / Selene Brophy

More women are traveling alone, and tour operators and travel companies are seeing a surge in older, married women embarking on these solo adventures. 

In 2023, the most common South African travelers booking with Flight Centre were women traveling solo, with an average age of 52: 38% of its customers booked solo, compared to 22% of bookings for couples, 6% for families and 6% for small-group bookings.

“We’re seeing a sharp rise in solo female travelers,” said Antoinette Turner, general manager in South Africa for Flight Centre, one of the country’s largest travel agencies. Flight Centre has also seen a 15% increase in solo traveler bookings, compared to 11% pre-pandemic, for tours conducted by The Travel Corporation brands Costsaver, Trafalgar, Insight, and Luxury Gold, over the past year. Women made 81% of these bookings.

A report by Road Scholar, a Boston-based tour operator of educational group travel for older adults, sees a similar trend among older women traveling without their partners.

About 60% of Road Scholar’s 19,000 solo traveler customers in 2022 were married women but traveling without their spouses. The company said 27% of these women had never traveled on a Road Scholar program with their spouse. The primary reasons for traveling solo were varied: 42% mentioned their spouse’s lack of interest in traveling, while 40% cited different travel interests. 

“I cherish my time to explore and do what I want on my timetable,” says Road Scholar solo traveler Marcia Henderson, 66. “I like to walk, hike, etc. He [my spouse] has knee issues and doesn’t share my passion for nature, culture, and history. It would be an atrocity not to travel just because my spouse doesn’t like it. This is my passion, and he is supportive as I support his golfing.”

According to Road Scholar, this trend is part of a broader pattern of Baby Boomer women travelers coming into their own, and society has shifted to “allow” older women the freedom to do it. 

Katalina Mayorga, founder of El Camino Travel, a company specializing in group tours for solo travelers, says she is seeing more female clients over 55 years engage in solo travel as they enter a phase she calls their “second best life.” 

“I don’t know how many emails we get where it’s like, ‘Hey, I want to experience the world. I’ve done what I needed to do with my kids; now it’s my time to take care of myself, but my husband doesn’t want to travel, so I’m going to travel by myself and live my second best life’,” said Mayorga. 

This Washington D.C.-based group travel company founded in 2014, did not start as a women-only tour operator. But with 90% of its clientele being women, the company now caters more specifically to their needs. 

In 2023, El Camino facilitated