You have already booked hotels for a family of four, argued with a contractor, and sat through more hospital waiting rooms than you would like. Handling a trip is not the question. The question is what the trip feels like when nobody is in the seat next to you. Here is the honest version, walked through in the order it happens.
The fear is specific, so name it
Almost nobody at 60 is afraid of the flight. The fear is smaller and more particular: eating dinner at a table for one, being the only woman in the group who came without a friend, being the oldest person in the van, standing in an arrivals hall at seven in the morning where you cannot read the signs.
Two of those disappear on the first evening. More than 95% of the women on Women Travel Abroad trips book on their own, so the woman who came with a friend is the unusual one, not you. The average traveler is 55. The oldest woman WTA has taken was 81. At 60 you are in the middle of the room.
Cheryl, 58, from Grottoes, Virginia, went to Egypt with WTA in 2024: “The ease of the trip, the thoughtful organization, and the sense of safety took all the worry and fear out of my hands.”
The arrivals hall is a real fear. It gets its own section below.
The money question, since it stops more trips than nerves do
In JourneyWoman’s March 2025 study “Invisible No More,” 78 percent of women over 50 named the single supplement as the biggest barrier to solo travel. It is the fee for sleeping in a room by yourself, and on many tours it runs from a few hundred dollars to the full price of a second person.
Women Travel Abroad does not charge one. The price on the page is the price for a room of your own. On the South Africa trip in August 2027 that is $7,495 for nine nights: a boutique hotel in Cape Town and a tented camp at Thanda Private Game Reserve, and every one of those nights is yours alone. Nobody hands you a roommate at check-in to make the math work.
Toasting to South Africa
The 90 days before you leave
This is where “solo” stops meaning “alone,” and it happens before you pack.
90 days out, your group and only your group gets on a video call with the Travel Hosts. Flights, visas, the practical questions. You see the faces. 60 days out, a packing list arrives with a video on doing the whole trip from a carry-on. At 35 days you are added to a private WhatsApp group, along with options for the free-time hours on the itinerary, and this is where the group starts planning around itself: who wants the museum, who wants the market. At 30 days there is a second call, the itinerary walked through hour by hour, every question answered before you leave.
By the time you reach the airport you have seen every woman in your group twice on a screen and read her messages for a month. That is the whole difference between traveling solo and traveling alone.
The airport
The long-haul flight is the same flight whether or not someone is beside you. Alone, you get the window. Book the earlier connection, not the tight one. Put your passport and the WhatsApp group on the same phone screen.
What changes is the other end, and this is the part first-timers picture wrong. You do not walk out of Cape Town International and start looking for a taxi. Private transportation is waiting, and it takes you to the hotel. In Seville, Spain the driver takes you into the center of the city, and by late afternoon you are on a boat on the Guadalquivir at sunset with the rest of the group. On the Seine cruise you are driven from Charles de Gaulle straight to the riverboat, the crew settles you into your cabin, and dinner that night is on board.
Arrive by the time on the trip page. Seville is 2pm local, Paris is 3pm. Miss that and you miss the first evening, which is the evening that does the most work.
What a day inside the group actually looks like
Take day two in Seville. In the morning you get a private guided walk through the Alcázar, the cathedral and up the Giralda, and a local guide who knows the city. By the afternoon the day is yours. Nobody schedules it. You can go back to the hotel and sleep off the flight, or find a bench in the Plaza de España, or follow two women from the group to the café they found. And then in the evening? It’s a lovely dinner together.
Want another example? On day six at Thanda, you’re up before dawn for the first game drive, because that is when the animals move. Back to camp for breakfast and a long, empty middle of the day by the pool or in your tent. Afternoon drive. Dinner with the group.
The shape is the same on every WTA trip: guided in the morning, free in the afternoon, together at night. The free afternoon is the solo part of solo travel, and it is the best part. You did not fly across an ocean to spend six hours in a van with nine people. You did this for you!
Solo is not the same as lonely
Groups are capped at 6 to 10 women. Not 16, not 24. At that size you know every name by the second breakfast, and the woman who is quiet on day one has a seat next to her at dinner on day two whether she asks for it or not.
Adrienne, 64, from Illinois, has taken four WTA trips, including South Africa in 2024: “It has allowed me to go to places and meet friends that I would never have gone and met.”
Two people make this work, and they are not the same person. The Travel Host travels with the group the whole trip. She is the one who knows which restaurant the group is walking to, who has the driver’s number, who notices you looked tired at breakfast. On South Africa and the Seine cruise that is Michelle Alexander, a Senior IT Analyst from Colorado Springs; on Southern Spain it is Tierra Anderson, a program coordinator from North Carolina. The local guide is a different person, hired in each city for what she knows about it.
More than 60% of WTA travelers book another trip within 12 months. Most of them book with a woman they met on the first one.
Your room at the end of the day
At 60 you know what you want at 9pm, and it is not a stranger’s suitcase on the other bed. A private room is not a luxury item on these trips and it is not an upgrade. It is the room. In Cape Town it is a boutique hotel. At Thanda it is a tent with a proper bed, a bathroom and a view of the bush. On the Seine it is your own cabin for seven nights and then your own room at a hotel near the Arc de Triomphe.
Close the door. Read. Call home. Nobody is waiting for you to turn the light off.
WTA traveler exploring Southern Spain
Which trip to take first
All three of these are rated Level 3, which means walking tours of two to three miles at a steady pace, some hills and some stairs. Read that rating honestly against your knees before you read anything else.
For a first solo trip, take the Paris and Normandy river cruise, November 2 to 10, 2027, $6,845 with your own cabin. You unpack once. Dinner is on the boat every night, so there is never a question of where to eat or with whom. Rouen, the D-Day beaches at Omaha and Pointe du Hoc, Monet’s garden at Giverny, then two days in Paris ending with dinner and the show at the Moulin Rouge.
It’s all there waiting for you to discover!
If you would rather have a city under your feet, take Southern Spain, November 4 to 10, 2027, $5,495 for six nights. Seville and Granada, a cooking class, the Alhambra with a guide, flamenco in the Sacromonte caves. Three of the six dinners are on your own, which is the right amount of solo for a first trip: enough to prove you can, not so much that you spend the week doing it.
Look no further than a relaxing, yet wonderful place to discover than southern Spain.
If the first trip is going to be the big one, take South Africa, August 19 to 28, 2027, $7,495 for nine nights. Four nights in Cape Town, then a flight north to Thanda for five game drives, a bush dinner and a boat on the St. Lucia estuary looking for hippos. It is the longest of the three and the only one with an internal flight, and it is the one women come home talking about.
Feeling like you might want to jump the gun? Don’t hesitate to look at the itinerary now!
The full 2027 calendar has more, and the trip list lets you filter by date and price.
Giraffes snacking on safari
The parts that stay hard
Jet lag is worse alone, because there is nobody to make you get up. Set the alarm anyway and go to the welcome dinner. The Level 3 rating is not decorative; the Giralda is a climb and Thanda is up at 5am. You pay the whole price yourself, and $5,495 is real money. And there will be one evening, probably day four, when you would rather stay in your room than go to dinner.
Go to dinner. Day four is when the group turns into a group.
For the wider picture on rooms, pace and pricing after 60, read the complete guide to solo travel for women over 60. When you are ready to see what a first trip looks like with dates and prices attached, browse the 2027 itineraries.