Eileen Jacobowitz wasn’t trying to avoid men. She was looking for an adventure, a trip to mark her daughter’s recent college graduation. But when the pair flipped through a catalog from adventure-focused tour company Backroads, a women-only hiking trip exploring Banff and the Canadian Rockies intrigued them both.
“All of my photos look fake because it was so beautiful,” says Jacobowitz, 59, of last year’s mother-daughter journey. She liked the vibe just as much as the views. Tough hikes felt fun, supportive. “It’s just a different experience when being with a bunch of women,” she says. “On the second day, I texted my sister and I said, ‘We’ve got to do one of these things together.’”
This summer, the sisters are headed to Maine on a five-day hiking trip, one of 40 women’s trips Backroads offers after trialing initial itineraries last year. Women’s trips are having a moment: Road Scholar, catering to the 50-plus set, saw enrollment in women-only departures nearly double between 2014 and 2024; options next year include a wellness retreat in Sedona, a Cuban cultural immersion, and Costa Rica birding. After introducing women’s tours in 2022, Insight Vacations now offers trips encompassing ancient Egyptian wonders and Portuguese byways. In August, Uniworld will debut its first women’s cruise, following the Rhône and Saône Rivers through southern France.
“We noticed more female passengers traveling on our ships with other women, such as sisters, mothers, and friends,” says Uniworld president and CEO Ellen Bettridge. Today, more women than ever are experimenting with single-gender group trips—a shift that comes as the future of solo travel trends increasingly female.
Travel looked different in 1982, when Susan Eckert started the tour company AdventureWomen, among the first to offer all-women’s tours. Eckert met women who wished to explore the big mountains of her Montana home but were hesitant to strike out solo. “She really founded the company as a way to make women feel safe doing these things, traveling on their own, but with a small group of like-minded women,” says AdventureWomen president Paige Davis. (Eckert died in 2017.)
More recent growth reflects cultural and economic changes, says Catheryn Khoo, who studies tourism and gender at Torrens University Australia. “[The travel industry has] caught onto this idea that women have the spending power,” she says. A recent survey by Skift found that 82 percent of all travel decisions are made by women, and it projected women would control 75 percent of discretionary spending by 2028. Searches for “solo female travel” increased more than 1,000 percent in the past decade, according to Google search data.
The numbers buck generational stereotypes, too. Older women take more solo trips than their younger counterparts, the survey found; those aged 65 and above are five times likelier to travel alone than 35- to 44-year-olds. “They’re going through a life change and thinking for the first time they could travel on their own,” says Carolyn Ray, CEO of solo women’s travel website JourneyWoman. “That’s the market that the larger tour companies have started to pay attention to.“ Many older women are ambitious travelers craving more than the basic wellness experiences often marketed to them, Khoo notes, contrasting the newer generation of women’s tours with past half-hearted efforts to sell travel to female travelers without accounting for their real interests. (As an example, Khoo recalls that a decade ago, as women became more frequent business travelers, hotels added pink amenities and women’s magazines, which she saw as condescending.) “These women who started these trips are the ones that have been frustrated. They have traveled, and saw their own needs aren’t met,” Khoo says. “Now they’re meeting the need. It comes from within and it comes from the experience of women travelers themselves.”
Those needs aren’t addressed only by single-gender trips. Women comprise the majority of solo travelers on most mixed-gender trips, too, a shift Khoo thinks will keep pushing the industry to adapt.
Yet the stories emerging from women-only trips often seem to highlight experiences of gender—how good and refreshing and different it can feel to travel with other women. “It was very freeing, very free,” says Joni Cobb, 71, of Longview, Texas, of her all-women Road Scholar trip to Quebec City. For Susan Boggs, a 67-year-old retiree and avid cyclist from Helena, Montana, the challenge of a Montana gravel-riding trip with The Cycling House proved satisfying as she pushed to keep up with female cyclists climbing thousands of feet on bumpy backroads. “With a group of women who are stronger than me, it’s more of an inspiration,” she says.
Other travelers have relished unexpected depth. When Shilpi Banerjee, a 52-year-old audiologist in Philadelphia, joined an AdventureWomen Portuguese Camino walking trip in 2018, she noticed how discussions of thorny topics—faith, criminal justice, reproductive health—flowed more easily than they would in a mixed-gender setting. “The camaraderie in these trips is phenomenal,“ says Banerjee, who is traveling with AdventureWomen to Mongolia and Everest Base Camp in 2025. “Many of us have stayed in touch, and when we’re planning travel for the coming year, we’ll reach out and say, ‘Anyone interested?’”
That sense of belonging, however, is not always all-inclusive. Even when the tone is celebratory and the benefits evident, identity-based groups are also defined by who is left out, notes Diana González, a DEI coach and trainer in Vermont. “The thing with any ‘only’ space for minoritized people is: ‘Who counts’?” she says.
In a travel industry still catching up to contemporary understandings of gender, trans and nonbinary travelers are far too often erased, often going unacknowledged on listings for women’s tours or anywhere else. González notes that such silence sends a clear message. “If they’re not explicit about it, then they are more likely to not be inclusive,” she says.
Many tour companies rooted in queer culture, on the other hand, have embraced a more expansive approach to women’s travel. With trips spanning classic East African safaris and Mekong River cruising, Olivia Travel has catered to lesbian and LGBTQ+ women for nearly 50 years. “Inclusiveness is at the heart of everything we do at Olivia,” says Autumn Nazarian, Olivia Travel’s VP of marketing. “We recognize and welcome the beautiful diversity within our community, including trans and nonbinary individuals who feel at home in a women-centered space.” The newer, very-small-group Avalon Women’s Travel Co. welcomes travelers of all sexual orientations on an upcoming seven-day Beltane Fire Festival trip to Scotland. “As long as you identify as female, please join us,” the website reads. “We’d love to have you.”
Still other trips highlight the simultaneous peril and possibility that travel holds for women—trans and cis—in a world that, despite halting progress, can still be frustratingly binary. Small-group adventure tour company Intrepid, which welcomes LGBTQIA+ travelers, notes that for women-only trips, trans guests are considered on a case-by-case basis with an eye to their security in widely varied destinations—and to the reality that they may not feel safe, or be welcomed, in gendered spaces the itineraries explore.
In 2017, Jenny Gray was traveling in Iran when she walked into a female salon with a local guide and saw a side of the country that sharply contrasted with the streets outside, where head coverings were mandatory and women faced scrutiny from morality police. “The hijabs came off, the jackets came off, the conversation was lively, and there was purple hair, midriff, and red lipstick,” recalls Gray, a senior product manager for Intrepid. “It was just this incredible atmosphere, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t speak a word of Farsi.”
For Gray, it was a revealing moment that served as inspiration when, the next year, she helped Intrepid launch women-only trips to Jordan, Iran, and Morocco, each highlighting women’s spaces, such as public baths and salons. In 2024, the company added a 12-day women’s expedition to Saudi Arabia that includes a home visit with a family of women.
Last year, while joining Intrepid’s 12-day women’s expedition to Pakistan, Gray once again observed how an all-female group can open doors. On the trip, the group met a young woman advocating for changes at her university, where limited bathroom facilities posed a problem for menstruating students. Her passion enabled her and her family to quickly forge a connection with the travelers.
“It led to all kinds of conversations with her auntie and her grandmother and her mother, sitting in the same room with women from all across the world,” Gray says. “I don’t believe that would have happened in another setting.”
