Once synonymous with grid-worthy moments, life-changing epiphanies and the chance to (whisper it) ‘find yourself’, solo travel has had a rebrand – with experts hailing the neurological benefits. WH makes the health case for booking a holiday on your own
It’s a tale as old as time. Or at least the early 00s. The burned-out office worker escapes corporate life to ‘find themselves’ on a farf lung island. Or perhaps it’s the story of the divorcee, lost in a city of love and pondering life’s meaning to the beat of a melancholic drone. Yes, the foibles of the female traveller have long been etched into popular culture. A woman, typecast as the lonely soul, is swept into the world of solo travel not by choice, but by circumstance. It was a break-up, after all, that led Eat Pray Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert to discover the sweetness of doing nothing in Rome. And it was a tragedy that drove the author of Wild to walk a thousand miles along America’s Pacific Crest Trail.
A hop, skip and three lockdowns later, the urge to fly solo is taking off once again. Searches for ‘solo travel’ rose by 761.5% last year, according to Google trend data, with 55% of UK searches being made by women, per research by the insights company Hitwise. Meanwhile, Booking.com reports near double-digit growth of solo travellers now versus pre-Covid times. ‘After spending so much time at home, we’re increasingly seeing consumers booking solo travel experiences in order to maximise their personal growth and independence,’ says Brielle Saggese, insight strategist at the trend forecasting company WGSN. But while a pandemic spent sofa-bound is one factor driving demand, a new area of research is offering another reason to take yourself on holiday. ‘Solo travel is a tonic for your mental health in so many ways, from greater resilience to the freedom of being your own person away from the demands and expectations of the people you know,’ says Radha Vyas, co-founder and CEO at adventure travel company Flash Pack. The problem is, it has a pretty tired rep. So park your expectations and shelve the travel memoir while we bring you the ill-explored cognitive benefits of travelling solo (without the cringe).
Taking off
Researchers were already connecting the dots between holidays and your mind long before Zoom quizzes were a thing. A 2013 study by the Institute for Applied Positive Research and the Harvard Business Review, based on a survey of 414 travellers, concluded that taking a trip can leave you happier, healthier and more productive when you return (if the travelling doesn’t prove too stressful). Going further afield, planning the trip more than a month in advance and recruiting the help of a local host or knowledgeable friend were also shown to boost a holiday’s healing powers.
More recently, in June 2022, researchers fr
