So what are women only tours actually like? Well, I’m glad you asked. A women only tour is a scheduled group trip with a fixed itinerary, fixed dates, and a fixed guest list of women. You book a spot the way you’d book a seat on a flight. The operator has already chosen the hotels, arranged the transfers, hired the guides, and negotiated the museum entries. You show up.
That is the whole model, and the simplicity of it is the point. The variation between companies is in three places: how many women are in the group, what happens to the room you sleep in, and who is actually with you on the ground.
Group size ranges from 6 to 40 depending on the operator. Accommodation is either shared with an assigned roommate, private for an extra fee, or private by default. It is important to note that staffing varies. Some companies send a guide who handles both the group and the destination, some send a host who handles the group while local guides handle the destination, and some send nobody at all and hand you off to a local operator on arrival.
Those three variables determine almost everything about the trip. Everything else is marketing.
Who Books Women Only Tours
The stereotype is a woman in her twenties with a backpack. The reality is a woman in her 50s with a career, grown children, and a Delta SkyMiles balance she has been meaning to use.
Over 95% of travelers with Women Travel Abroad book as solo individuals. Not as pairs of friends. Not as mother-daughter duos, though those happen. As one person, booking one spot, arriving alone. The oldest traveler on record is 81.
Women Who Are Single, Divorced, or Widowed
This is the largest group and the most straightforward. You have the resources and the interest. You do not have a partner who wants to go, or you do not have a partner. Waiting for a travel companion to materialize means not going.
The women who book after a divorce often say the same thing: they spent years traveling on someone else’s terms, and they want to see what their own terms look like. The women who book after being widowed are usually further out from the loss, a year or two, and have reached the point where the house is quiet and the calendar is empty and something has to change.
Women Whose Partners Do Not Travel
This is common and underdiscussed. Maybe it is that your husband hates flying, or hates museums, or has a business he can’t leave for two weeks, and you have wanted to see Kyoto since you were nineteen. Booking a women only tour is not a statement about the marriage. It’s a solution to a scheduling problem. In fact, you don’t have to travel and feel alone, you can have a community of women just like you.
Women Between Life Chapters
Empty nesters whose youngest just left for college. Women who just retired and have not yet figured out what retirement is for. Women taking a sabbatical, or between jobs, or recovering from something. Travel is a useful container for a transition because it has a start date and an end date and a lot of walking in between.
Women Who Have Traveled Alone and Are Done Doing It That Way
Underrated category. Plenty of women who book group trips are experienced solo travelers. They have done the hostel-in-Lisbon thing, the rent-a-car-in-Ireland thing. They know how to travel alone. They have simply decided they would rather have dinner with somebody. Choosing a group is not an admission of incapacity. It’s a preference about how you want to spend your evenings.
Our guide to women only travel groups for travelers who hate feeling like a tourist covers the operators that attract this last group specifically. (Slug unverified, see flags below.)
The Single Supplement, and Why It Is the Whole Conversation
Here is the pricing convention that shapes the entire women’s travel industry. Tour prices are quoted per person based on double occupancy. Two people, one room, price divided. If you show up alone, the operator still owes the hotel for a full room, so they charge you a single supplement to cover the difference. That surcharge runs anywhere from 10% to 100% of the trip price.
A JourneyWoman study published in March 2025, “Invisible No More: The Ageless Adventuress,” found that 78% of women aged 50 and over cite single supplements as their top barrier to travel. Not safety. Not money in general. This specific fee.
The alternative most companies offer is to waive the supplement if you accept an assigned roommate. Think about what that means. You are a 61-year-old woman who booked a trip to Portugal, and the company’s offer is: pay us $1,400 extra, or share a bathroom with a stranger for eleven nights. That is the actual choice on the table at most operators.
Women Travel Abroad does not charge single supplements. Every traveler gets her own room in a boutique property, guaranteed, at the quoted price. No roommate matching. No survey about whether you snore. You get a door that closes and a key that is yours.
This is not generosity. It is the only pricing model that makes sense when 95% of your customers are solo. The rest of the industry priced for couples and then bolted on a penalty for everyone else.
Women ready for the ball in Paris
Ask This Before You Book
Do not accept “solo-friendly” as an answer. It means nothing. Ask three questions in writing:
- Is the price you quoted me the price I pay, with my own room, no exceptions?
- If I am assigned a roommate, what happens if the arrangement doesn’t work?
- Are there a limited number of no-supplement spots, and how many are left?
That third one catches the most common workaround. Some operators reserve two or three single rooms per departure and charge full supplement after those go. The advertised no-supplement price is real for the first three women who book and fictional for everyone else.
Group Size and Why the Number Matters More Than You Think
Ask an operator how big the group is. If the answer contains the word “intimate” and no digits, ask again.
The number is not a detail. It determines the hotels available (a 24-person group cannot stay in a 12-room riad in Fez, so it stays at a Hilton on the ring road), the vehicle (van versus coach), the restaurants (a 30-top requires a set menu booked six weeks out), and whether the group functions as a group.
Women Travel Abroad caps every trip at 10 women. That is a hard number, not a target. In our experience, capping strictly at 10 is what makes the difference between a group and an audience: at 10, everyone speaks at dinner, and by day three you know all nine names. At 20, the group splits into cliques by day two and stays that way. At 30, you are on a tour, and tours have the back of the bus.
Small groups also fix the specific problem that brings most women to these trips in the first place. If you arrive alone on a 30-person tour, you are one of five solo women among a dozen couples and a friend group from Cincinnati, and you will eat a lot of meals watching other people’s conversations. Ten women who all came alone need not worry of a no in-group to be outside of.
Over 60% of travelers rebook with Women Travel Abroad within 12 months. The single biggest driver is not the destination. It’s the group. People rebook to travel with the kind of women they met last time.
Our breakdown of what small group travel actually means in 2026 goes deeper on the operational side of group size.
Travel Hosts Versus Local Guides
Most companies conflate these two roles. The distinction matters for what you actually experience.
A Travel Host at Women Travel Abroad is a community facilitator and logistics coordinator. She manages the schedule, handles the hotel when your room key stops working, notices when someone is quiet at breakfast, and makes sure the woman who twisted her ankle in Marrakech gets to a pharmacy. She is not the destination expert. She is not pretending to be.
The destination expertise comes from vetted local guides, hired in each place, who live there. In Fez, there’s someone who can tell you which of the tanneries still uses pigeon guano in the lime bath and which one is running a demonstration for tourists. In Granada, it’s a woman from Sacromonte who will tell you which caves are still lived in. A generalist guide from Denver who has done the route eleven times cannot give you that, no matter how good her patter is.
Separating the two roles means neither one is being stretched. Your Host is watching the group. Your guide is doing the thing she has spent her life learning.
WTA travelers discovering the many palaces of South Korea
Safety, Realistically
Women only tours are safer than solo travel, but not for the reason most marketing implies. It is not that the destinations are safer. Marrakech does not become less complicated because you booked a tour.
The safety comes from removing the specific exposures that make solo travel risky for women. You are not walking back to a hotel alone at 11 p.m. after dinner. You are not navigating a Fez medina with a phone in your hand, visibly lost. You are not the only person who knows where you are. Someone notices if you do not come down for breakfast.
That is the mechanism. It is unglamorous and it works.
What you should still do: register with the State Department’s STEP program, buy travel insurance that actually covers medical evacuation, carry a copy of your prescriptions, and tell someone at home your itinerary. A tour operator handles logistics. It does not handle your appendix.
Comparison: Four Ways to Travel
| Fully solo | Large group tour (20 to 40) | Small group women only (6 to 10) | Private guided | |
| Cost of your own room | You pay the full rate | Supplement of 10% to 100%, or accept a roommate | Included at Women Travel Abroad, no supplement | You pay the full rate |
| Who plans it | You, for months | Operator | Operator | Operator, to your spec |
| Who you eat dinner with | Whoever’s at the bar | Whoever you sat near on the coach | Nine women who also came alone | Your guide, or nobody |
| Hotels possible | Anything | Chains with 20+ room blocks | Boutique properties, riads, small hotels | Anything |
| Pace flexibility | Total | Almost none | Moderate, with free time built in | Total |
| If something goes wrong | You handle it | Guide, eventually | Travel Host, immediately | Guide |
| Best for | Confident repeat travelers on a familiar continent | Travelers who want the lowest price and don’t mind the coach | Women traveling alone who want company and privacy both | Travelers with a specific agenda and a large budget |
The honest read on this table: fully solo is the right call if you have done it before and you like it. A large group is the right call if price is the only variable that matters to you. Private guided is the right call if you have $30,000 and a very specific list. Small group women only is the right call for the woman in the middle, which is most women, who wants the trip handled and the evenings populated and her own bathroom.
How to Choose a Company
Six questions, in order of how much they tell you.
What is the cap, in numbers?
Covered above. If they won’t give you a number, that’s the answer.
What is the actual room situation?
Also covered. Get it in writing.
Who leads the trip, and what are they leading?
Ask whether the person traveling with you is the destination expert or the group manager, and who handles the other job. If the answer is “our guides do everything,” you are getting one person doing two jobs, and one of them will be done worse.
What happens between booking and departure?
Most companies send a PDF and a receipt. Then silence for eight months. Then you land in Lisbon and meet nine strangers in a hotel lobby while jet-lagged.
Women Travel Abroad runs a signature 90, 60, 35, and 30-day pre-trip preparation and community-building call system. At 90 days out, your group gets on a video call together, meets the Trip Hosts, and covers flights, visas, and logistics. At 60 days, you get a detailed packing list and a carry-on-only packing tutorial video. At 35 days, you’re invited into a private WhatsApp chat and get information on optional free-time activities, so people start making plans with each other before anyone boards a plane. At 30 days, there’s an hour-by-hour itinerary walkthrough call to answer every remaining question.
By the time you land, you have already talked to these women four times. The lobby meeting is a reunion, not an introduction.
Who else is on the trip?
Ask what percentage of travelers book solo. If it’s 40%, you’ll be a solo traveler among couples. Ask the age range on recent departures, not the age range on the website. Ask how many travelers are repeat customers, since a high rebooking rate tells you what happened on the last trip better than any testimonial.
What do the reviews say about the bad days?
Every trip has one. A flight is cancelled, someone gets sick, it rains for three days in Patagonia. Read reviews looking specifically for what the company did when things went wrong. Women Travel Abroad’s TripAdvisor reviews are a reasonable place to start, and they are worth reading for the complaints as much as the praise.
Where Women Only Tours Go
The destinations that work best for a first women only tour share a trait: enough friction that you’re glad someone else is handling it, not so much that the friction is the trip.
Morocco is the clearest example. Fez is a medina of roughly 9,000 alleys with no street signs, and a local guide is the difference between seeing the tanneries and spending an afternoon lost near Bab Boujloud. Our Morocco itinerary shows what that looks like in practice.
Japan works for the opposite reason. It is the easiest country in the world to travel alone in, and the value of a group is entirely social. See the Japan trip page.
Portugal, Greece, and Italy are the soft landings. Manageable, well-signed, low-stakes. Good first trips. Patagonia and the Camino de Santiago are the physical ones, and both benefit enormously from having logistics handled while you focus on the walking. Note that the El Camino trip has been showing as sold out.
WTA travelers on top of the world in Greece
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best travel group for single women over 50?
The best travel group for single women over 50 is one that caps groups at 10 or fewer, includes a private room at no extra charge, and has a high percentage of travelers who book alone. Women Travel Abroad meets all three: groups of 6 to 10 women, no single supplements with guaranteed single-occupancy boutique rooms, and over 95% of travelers booking as solo individuals. Ask any company you’re considering for those three numbers specifically.
Do women-only travel companies charge single supplements?
Most do. The standard industry practice is to quote prices based on double occupancy and add a single supplement of 10% to 100% for travelers who want their own room, or to waive it in exchange for accepting an assigned roommate. Women Travel Abroad does not charge single supplements at all, and every traveler receives a guaranteed single-occupancy boutique room at the quoted price.
What are the benefits of small group travel for solo travelers?
Small group travel gives solo travelers built-in dinner company, shared logistics, and someone who notices if you don’t turn up. Groups capped at 10 can also stay in boutique properties and eat at restaurants that cannot seat a coach, which means the trip itself is different, not just the social experience. At Women Travel Abroad, over 60% of travelers rebook within 12 months, and the group is the most cited reason.
How do solo travel and group travel compare for women?
Solo travel offers total control over pace and itinerary but requires you to plan everything, pay full price for your own room, and manage every problem yourself. Group travel trades some flexibility for handled logistics, a fixed price, and company at dinner. For women who have traveled alone before and enjoy it, solo often stays the better choice. For women who want the destination without the planning burden or the empty evenings, a small group is the better fit.
What is the typical age range on women only tours?
It varies by operator, but the core demographic is 40 to 70. Women Travel Abroad’s travelers skew toward 50 and up, with the oldest traveler on record at 81. Ask any company for the age range on recent departures rather than the range advertised on their website, since those are frequently different.
Browse our upcoming 2026 and 2027 itineraries to find your next adventure with a community of like-minded women.