Solo Travel for Women: How to Start (and Stay Safe)

Most advice on solo travel for women starts with fear. That’s exactly why so many women never book. The order is backwards: you start with inspiration, the place that pulls you so hard the fear stops being the loudest voice in the room, then you vet it for safety, decide whether to go solo or join others, book to protect future-you, and trust your instinct on the ground. And your first trip doesn’t need to be Patagonia. It can be four days in Lisbon.

Here’s the whole method in one breath. Find a destination that genuinely lights you up. Pressure-test it for safety. Decide whether you’ll go fully solo or lean on a group or a well-trodden route. Book so the nervous version of you, arriving tired at night, is looked after. Then trust your instinct once you’re there. That’s it, and none of it requires being the outdoorsy, fearless type. The rest of this is how each step works, with the trips where I learned it.

Why Fear Is the Wrong Place to Start (and Inspiration Is the Right One)

Almost every guide to solo travel for women opens on danger, scams, harassment, the hundred things that could go sideways. The safety part matters enormously, and most of this article is about it. But leading with fear gets the sequence wrong.

Fear is abstract until you have something to weigh it against. Tell a woman with no particular trip in mind that solo travel can be risky, and the risk is the only thing in the room. Give her a reason first, a place she aches to see, and now it’s not “should I do this frightening thing for no reason,” it’s “this thing I want is on the other side of some fear I can manage.” That’s the calculation that ends with a booked flight.

Find the reason before you weigh the risk. Inspiration is what makes the fear worth managing in the first place.

How I Found My First Solo Trip: Typing “Mind-Blowing Landscapes” Into Google

In 2018 I came out of a brutal summer internship. I was wrung out and a bit empty, and I’d just landed a job that didn’t start for another five months. I had a small savings buffer, about five thousand, enough to cushion me if the job fell through, or to spend if it didn’t. I’d always dreamt of adventure, and a solo adventure was already in the back of my mind. This was the window.

There was also a simpler truth underneath it: no one could come with me. Not for five months, not even for the six weeks I ended up taking. If I waited for a travel companion to be free, I’d wait forever. Solo wasn’t the brave choice, it was the only choice that let the trip happen at all.

So one night, looking for something to feel excited about, I typed “mind-blowing landscapes” into Google. A photo stopped me cold, granite towers above a glacial lake with beautiful colours. It was Torres del Paine. I didn’t even know Patagonia existed until that moment. I just knew I had to stand where that photo was taken.

My entire hiking experience amounted to about three days, never once alone. Didn’t matter. I decided to go all in, but I hedged. I capped Patagonia at three weeks in case I hated it, chose Argentina and Chile because they were meant to be the safest in South America, and bolted on three weeks in North America afterward: New York, Washington DC, Boston, Quebec City, Toronto. The familiarity was deliberate, and I had friends in NYC and Toronto. If Patagonia broke me, I had a soft landing built into the back half.

The trip that changes your life can start with a Google search and a photo. Let the place pull you in first, you can engineer the safety net after.

Your First Solo Trip Doesn’t Need to Be Patagonia

I led with Patagonia because it’s my story, not because it’s the bar. If granite towers and three-week hikes sound like someone else’s holiday, good, because the best first solo trip for most women is small, close, and easy.

It can be four days in Lisbon. A weekend in Amsterdam. Copenhagen, Edinburgh, a few days in a city where the trains run on time and people speak some English and nothing about it frightens you. A short, safe, low-stakes trip teaches you the exact same core skills as a big one, eating alone, finding your way, trusting your read on a street, with a fraction of the nerve required. You can always go bigger next time. Most women who start with a long weekend do.

If you want a fuller list of places that work beautifully for a first trip, I keep a running guide to the best solo travel destinations for women, every one picked because solo women actually go there, love it, and come back.

The best first solo trip is small and safe, not epic. Lisbon for four days will teach you everything Patagonia would, with a tenth of the fear.

The Safety Vet: Check the Place Before You Fall Too Hard For It

Once a destination has its hooks in you, run it through a safety check before you’re too committed to think clearly. This is where solo travel safety actually begins, research you do with a specific place in mind.

Start with the official government advisories. The UK’s FCDO foreign travel advice, for example, gives country-by-country guidance and lets you sign up for updates on a specific country, and US travellers have the equivalent in the State Department’s advisories. These give you the big picture: regions to avoid, the baseline.

Then go granular, because “is this country safe” is the wrong question, safety is a neighbourhood-level thing. A city can be perfectly fine and still have two streets you don’t want to walk alone after dark. That gap is why I built the Just Gutsy safety maps: neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood ratings for solo female travellers, from safe to avoid-at-night. Whether it’s the Paris map or the Lisbon map, the point is to know before you arrive that the cheap hotel that looks lovely is a ten-minute walk from a station you’d rather not cross at midnight.

Vet the place at two zoom levels: the country advisory for the big picture, the neighbourhood map for where you’ll actually sleep and walk.

The Safest Countries to Start With: Good First Solo Trips for Women

If you want the shortcut version, the destinations that consistently work for a first trip, where the safety question mostly answers itself, start here. These are the routes solo women actually do, not bucket-list fantasy.

• Europe by train. Lisbon, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Prague on a single rail pass. The gentlest possible on-ramp: short hops, big cities, easy to bail to the next town if one doesn’t suit you.
• Japan. Probably the safest solo destination on the planet, with public transport you can trust at any hour. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka.
• Australia and New Zealand. English-speaking, friendly hostel culture, and in New Zealand’s case one of the safest countries in the world.
• USA East Coast. Washington DC, New York, Boston, with Montreal a train ride away, exactly the familiar-feeling leg I leaned on for my own first trip.
• Southeast Asia, then Patagonia. The classic backpacker trail and the end-of-the-world hike, worth knowing about for when you’re ready to go bigger, but no, you don’t have to start here.

The safest first trips are the well-trodden ones, Europe by train, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. Start where the safety question answers itself.

When a Place Doesn’t Pass: Going Solo, Grouped, or Finding Your People

Sometimes the research comes back uncertain. Now you make an honest decision: do you want this destination badly enough to go anyway, or do you take the pressure off? There’s no shame in either answer.

If the uncertainty is sitting wrong with you, that’s when solo travel groups earn their place, a small-group tour or a women’s travel group gets you somewhere that would feel like too much alone. The gentler on-ramp is the well-trodden route: Patagonia worked for me partly because the Torres del Paine circuits funnel hikers from all over the world along the same paths. You’re alone, but alone among people doing exactly what you’re doing. Use the table below to sort which kind of trip you’re actually looking at.

And there’s a third option that isn’t solo-versus-group at all: go solo, but not friendless. Post your trip to a community of solo travellers, see who’s already there or heading the same way, and turn an uncertain leg into a shared one. Start where others go, get comfortable, then increase the difficulty deliberately, trip by trip.

A place that doesn’t pass the solo test isn’t off the table, it’s a candidate for a group, a known route, or finding people already going your way.

How to Book Your First Solo Trip So Future-You Feels Safe

The version of you reading this is calm and rested. The version who matters is the one landing in an unfamiliar city at 9pm, jet-lagged. Book for her.

First, book your flight to land in daylight. You get a sense of the place as you arrive, and more options for getting in from the airport, so you’re not forced into the one shady taxi because you have no choice. Then book everywhere you’re sleeping in advance, somewhere with food options nearby, so you can eat without a second expedition into an unknown city at night. (These days that’s situational, in a place I know is safe I don’t bother; somewhere dicier, I still do it every time.)

Then de-risk the structure, the way I did with Patagonia: pair an ambitious leg with a familiar one, and cap the unknown portion so a bad first week can’t sink the whole trip. And when you arrive, before anything else, ask your accommodation which areas are safe to walk at night. Locals tell you in thirty seconds what no guidebook spells out; cross-check it against your map and you’ve got a working picture before your first evening out.

Book for the tired, disoriented version of you who actually arrives, a daylight landing, first-night food nearby, a familiar leg in the mix, and local intel before you wander.

Do You Need Self-Defence Classes? (I Took Them and Never Used Them)

Before my year-long trip, December 2023 to January 2024, not before Patagonia or the shorter trips in between, I took Krav Maga lessons. I never used them. Not once.

And I’d still recommend it, with a caveat. The value wasn’t any technique; it was how I carried myself afterward. Knowing I had some capacity to react, that I wasn’t helpless if the worst happened, changed my baseline from low-grade dread to quiet confidence. But to be clear: you do not need this to travel solo. Plenty of women travel the world beautifully without ever setting foot in a gym, and a four-day trip to Lisbon certainly doesn’t call for it. It’s only worth considering if a fear of being powerless is the specific thing keeping you home.

Self-defence training is entirely optional and you’ll probably never use it. Its one real job is retiring the fear of being helpless, skip it unless that’s the fear holding you back.

How to Stay Safe While Travelling Alone as a Woman

This is the on-the-ground core, the part of solo female travel tips no advisory or map can do for you, because it happens in real time. A few principles I won’t bend on:

• Treat your instinct as data, not drama. If you don’t know where your instinct is, I get you, I didn’t either, but solo travel reconnected me with it. It’s a little voice, a feeling that tries to tell you something. When something feels off, a person, a street, a situation, leave. The discomfort is the reason; you don’t need one that would hold up in court. Solo, there’s no one to talk you out of a good instinct, which is exactly why it gets the final say.
• Say no early, and you’ll never have to lie. A lot of advice tells women to invent a boyfriend waiting nearby. I’ve never done it. If you’re reaching for a fake partner to extract yourself, the real problem is upstream: you stayed in the conversation too long, or didn’t state your boundary when you first felt it. Cut it short, politely, clearly, without justification. Practise the clean exit, not the cover story.
• Tell someone where you are. Share your location and rough plan with family back home, and with people you’ve come to trust nearby when you’re somewhere uncertain. It costs nothing and means someone would notice.
• Build in company by design. Stay in hostels for the social hum, or plug into a community of solo travellers, people on the road now, and people who’ve done your exact route and are home to tell you about it. Connection isn’t just nice; it’s a safety layer.

Staying safe solo is mostly one skill repeated: notice the discomfort, act on it immediately, and never let politeness talk you out of leaving.

Trust the Voice: The Pass in Switzerland Where I Left

In 2021 I spent ten days alone on the Hiker’s Haute Route in Switzerland. On a long day, resting before a final climb, I started chatting with a few women I’d been crossing paths with. Something was off, I didn’t feel at ease, the weather was turning, and a quiet voice said: go, now. There was no danger I could point to. These were lovely women, and conventional wisdom says you’re safer in company. I left anyway.

Nothing dramatic happened. That’s the entire lesson. When you’re solo, you act on the voice before it has to prove itself, because by the time you have evidence, it’s too late to be cautious. I’d do it again every single time.

The instinct doesn’t owe you an explanation. When the voice says go, you go, and you never make it earn it first.

How to Start Solo Travel as a Woman: The 5-Step Checklist

Everything above, distilled into the sequence I’d hand a friend who messaged me “I think I want to do this but I’m terrified.”

• Get inspired first. Find the place that pulls you, a city, a coastline, a trail. It can be small. The reason just has to outweigh the fear.
• Vet the place for safety. Check the country-level government advisory, then go neighbourhood-level with a safety map.
• Decide solo or supported. Straightforward place, go solo. Uncertain but you want it, consider a group, a known route, or checking a community for who’s going or already there.
• Book to protect future-you. Daylight landing, first night with food nearby, a familiar leg paired with the ambitious one. On arrival, ask locals which areas to avoid at night.
• Trust your instinct on the ground. Leave the moment you feel uncomfortable. Say no early. Share your location. Build in company when you want it.

Use it in order. The order is the whole trick.

The Real Reason You Haven’t Gone: You’re Waiting for Someone to Come With You

Let me name the thing that actually stops most women, because it stopped me too. It isn’t danger. It’s that no one could come.

Schedules never align. Someone always has a job, a partner, a reason. So the trip you want sits in a drawer marked “one day, when someone’s free”, and someone is never free. The fact that no one could follow me for six weeks wasn’t what made my first trip hard. It’s what made it happen. Solo isn’t the consolation prize when no one’s around. It’s what frees you from needing anyone to be.

But here’s what I wished existed back then, planning that first trip alone at my kitchen table. Not a travel buddy I’d have to coordinate calendars with for months. Just… other women doing the same thing. Someone already in Lisbon who could tell me which neighbourhood actually felt safe at night. Another solo traveller arriving the same week who’d split a dinner. A woman who’d done the exact route and could say “take this train, skip that hostel, you’ll be fine.” Company when I wanted it, solitude when I didn’t, and zero dependency on any one person’s free time.

That’s the entire reason Just Gutsy exists. It connects you with solo travellers near you, on the road now, or home and happy to share what they learned, and lets you post a trip and find the people already going your way. You don’t wait for a companion. You just go, and the company finds you.

Stop waiting for someone to be free. The trip is the thing you do alone; the company is the thing you find along the way. Join the Just Gutsy waitlist →