Solo female travel: an honest guide for women travelling alone

If you're planning to travel alone, whether it's your first trip or your fortieth, this page is for you. We won't tell you not to go, and we won't pretend it's all easy. We'll tell you what matters, where the data comes from, and how to use it.

Women are already the majority of solo travellers. Hostelworld's 2026 report, which looked at 4.5 million solo trips booked between July 2025 and June 2026 and surveyed 3,309 travellers, found 59.3% of its sample were women.¹ The question isn't whether women travel alone. It's whether they get honest information to do it well.

What actually matters

Night-time safety, not "safety". A city can feel calm at noon and very different at 1am on the wrong street with no transport. Our city pages split safety into separate tabs: general, women, night, typical scams. Read the last two closely.

The neighbourhood before the bed. A beautiful hotel in an area that empties after dark means a taxi every time you go out. Choose the area first: near a metro stop, well lit, places open late. Then pick a bed inside it.

The right kind of room. In Hostelworld's survey, 54.5% of women said a women-only or same-gender dorm makes them more likely to book.¹ If you're hosteling, filter for it. In hotels, it's reasonable to ask for a room above the ground floor.

Your drink. The UK Foreign Office's advice for women travelling abroad notes that drinks can be spiked without you noticing, including tea and coffee, and recommends keeping your drink with you and not accepting drinks from strangers.² Its Thailand page says drink spiking and drug-assisted sexual assault happen in tourist areas, with male and female victims, and that attacks are most common at full moon parties and near bars late at night.³ That's not a reason to skip Thailand. It's a reason to sort your ride home before you go out.

Company, when you want it. Travelling alone doesn't mean being alone all the time. Walking tours, classes, shared dinners, hostels with events: every city page has a "Meet people" block with places, days and times.

The indices: what they measure, and what they don't

Two indices feed into our scores and are worth knowing by name.

The Women, Peace and Security Index from Georgetown University ranks 181 countries on three dimensions: inclusion (education, work, representation), justice (discrimination, access to justice) and security (intimate partner violence, perceived community safety, political violence targeting women). In the 2025/26 edition, Denmark is first.⁴

The Global Peace Index measures a country's peacefulness as a whole. In 2026 Iceland is first for the 19th year running, followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ireland. The United States ranks 134th.⁵

The limit of both: they describe life for residents, not a visitor's walk home at 2am. That's why the Solo Score combines them with local data and each city's own safety notes.

Using the Solo Score as a solo woman

When you switch the Solo Score to the women's profile, the weights change like this:

Safety adds up to 45 points out of 100. That's a deliberate editorial choice, and we say so. But the score doesn't decide for you. A city on 70 may suit you perfectly if your days are museums and markets, less so if you want to be out every night.

The ranking below is generated from the data and updates when the data does. Open any city to see each component, and focus on the ones that matter to you. The full method is on the Solo Score page.

Read before you go

• First solo trip checklist: documents, the first night, a plan B.
• Eating alone: the counter method: dinner is the part most people dread, and the fix is choosing the right place.
• The single supplement and how to avoid it: room-share tours and cabins built for one.
• Where to go alone in December: climate and events for the month.

If something on a city page looks wrong to you, tell us through the Corrections page. This guide gets better every time someone who actually went points out what we missed.