Solo Travel

Nobody puts this in the Instagram caption. You’re four days into a solo trip, you’ve seen three cathedrals, the food was good, and at about 7pm on a Tuesday it hits you that you haven’t had a proper conversation since you landed. This is normal. It happens to almost everyone. And it’s not a sign

The hostel-or-hotel question gets answered badly because people answer it as a money question. It mostly isn’t. It’s a question about whether you want to meet people, and how much you’re willing to trade for it. I’ve done both extensively, sometimes in the same week, and here’s the honest breakdown. The money part, quickly A

“How much do I need?” is the question that stops most first solo trips before they start. And the internet’s answer is useless, because half the blogs say $500 and half say $5,000 and both are technically telling the truth about somewhere. So let’s do this properly. Real numbers, three budget tiers, and the costs

Nobody warns you about the first night. They tell you solo travel is liberating and transformative, and then you’re sitting on a hotel bed at 8pm in a country where you don’t speak the language, wondering what on earth you’ve done. This is nearly universal. It’s not a sign you’ve made a mistake, and it

Here’s the small, slightly sad problem with travelling alone: you come home with 400 photographs of buildings and none of yourself. And the ones you do have are arm’s-length selfies with a nostril angle and half a cathedral behind your head. This is entirely fixable and it doesn’t require asking strangers or buying much. Here’s

I live in Spain, so this is written from the inside rather than from a fortnight’s holiday. The short version: Spain is one of the easiest countries in Europe for a woman travelling alone, and the things that make it easy are not the things people usually list. Here’s what it’s actually like day to

Almost everything written about solo travel is aimed at someone in their twenties with a backpack, a hostel bunk and unlimited time. That’s a small slice of the people actually doing it. The fastest growing group of solo travellers is over 40, and a lot of them are doing it after a divorce, after the

You’ve decided to travel on your own. Then you start looking at group tours and wonder whether that counts, or whether it’s cheating, or whether it’s actually the sensible thing to do. It’s a real question and the answer isn’t the same for everyone. A group tour is still solo travel, in the sense that

I’ve done a fair amount of travelling alone and I’ve been bad at it in most of the ways it’s possible to be bad at it. None of these mistakes ruined a trip. They just made things harder, more expensive or less enjoyable than they needed to be, which is worse in a way, because

Solo travel advice online is weirdly obsessed with Southeast Asia and Portugal. Which is fine, but if you’re American, or already in America, flying twelve hours to prove you can eat dinner alone seems like a lot. The US is genuinely good for a first solo trip. Everyone speaks your language, or at least a