Why Solo Travel Is Awesome!

Editor’s Note: This editorial draws on more than 25 years of independent travel, first-hand experience and publicly documented evidence and regulatory changes. Many of these editorials were written years before the issues became mainstream, and have been updated to reflect current developments while remaining true to their original arguments.

There is a reason so many people who travel solo end up becoming passionate advocates for it.

Ask anyone who has spent any length of time travelling the world on their own and you’ll probably hear a similar story. What often begins as a practical decision because nobody else can come soon becomes a deliberate choice. They discover that travelling alone offers something they simply can’t get any other way, and before long they find themselves wondering why they ever thought they needed someone else to come with them in the first place.

I’ve spent more than twenty-five years travelling, and the majority of those journeys have been solo. I’ve travelled with partners and friends too, and those trips have been fantastic in their own way, but I keep coming back to solo travel because there is something about it that no other style of travel quite matches. It gives you complete freedom, pushes you beyond your comfort zone, introduces you to incredible people and quietly changes the way you think about both the world and yourself.

Unfortunately, too many people never give themselves the chance to discover that because they’ve already convinced themselves that solo travel is dangerous, lonely, boring or somehow only for exceptionally brave people. Friends and family often reinforce those fears without meaning to, asking whether it’s safe, why you would want to go alone or suggesting you should simply wait until somebody else can come with you instead.

That advice usually comes from a good place, but it is still bad advice. Do you really want to miss out on the trip of a lifetime because your best mate can’t get the time off work? Because somebody else says they’re skint? Because your friend doesn’t want to leave their boyfriend for three weeks, even though they’ll probably have broken up by Christmas anyway?

Of course you don’t.

The reality is that most of the assumptions people make about solo travel simply aren’t true. No, it isn’t perfect. There will be times when you feel lonely, things won’t always go according to plan and, like anywhere else in the world, you’ll still need to use common sense and take sensible precautions. None of that changes the fact that solo travel is one of the safest, most rewarding and most empowering ways to experience the world, and if you let those misconceptions stop you from travelling then you’ll miss out on an experience that has the potential to change the way you see both travel and yourself.

The truth is that people don’t fall in love with solo travel because nothing ever goes wrong. They fall in love with it because of everything it gives them in return. The freedom to follow your own curiosity without compromise, the confidence that comes from discovering you are capable of far more than you imagined, the friendships formed with people you would never otherwise have met and the quiet realisation that the biggest thing standing between you and the world was never a lack of money, time or opportunity. More often than not, it was simply waiting for someone else to come with you.

That is why solo travel is awesome, and why I think every traveller should experience it at least once in their life.

Why Solo Travel Feels Different

There is something about solo travel that is surprisingly difficult to explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. On the surface, it shouldn’t feel all that different. You’re still catching flights, wandering through unfamiliar cities, climbing mountains and visiting famous sights. You’re seeing the same world as everybody else.

The difference isn’t where you travel. It’s how you experience it.

When you travel with somebody else, your attention is naturally shared. Every decision becomes a conversation, every change of plan a compromise and every new experience something you instinctively turn to share. You ask where they want to eat, whether they’re enjoying themselves, if they’re ready to move on or what they think of the place you’ve just arrived in. There is nothing wrong with that; it’s simply how we experience the world together.

Solo travel quietly removes that constant point of reference.

Instead of filtering every decision through somebody else’s thoughts, opinions or priorities, you begin responding directly to the world around you. You follow your own curiosity without needing agreement, linger somewhere because it fascinates you rather than because everyone else is happy to stay, and notice details you might otherwise have missed because your attention isn’t divided. It sounds like a subtle change, but emotionally it is a significant one because, often for the first time in years, you’re making decisions based entirely on what genuinely interests you.

That shift doesn’t just change the way you travel. It changes the way you think.

Without really noticing it, you become more present because you’re paying closer attention to your surroundings. You become more observant because there is nobody else leading the conversation. You become more open to unexpected encounters because you aren’t wrapped up in your own little group, and you become more comfortable trusting your own judgement because there is nobody else making decisions for you.

That is why solo travel leaves such a lasting impression on so many people. It isn’t simply about seeing the world alone. It’s about experiencing it directly, without the filters, expectations and compromises that quietly shape so much of everyday life. Somewhere along the journey you stop asking what everybody else wants from the experience and start discovering what you want instead.

You Discover Who You Really Are

One of the biggest clichés about solo travel is that you’ll ‘find yourself.’ I’ve always hated that phrase because it sounds like it has been lifted straight out of some liberal self-help book, usually written by somebody who thinks the answer to every problem in life is a mindfulness retreat and a crystal collection.

The reality is much less mystical and, to my mind, far more interesting.

A huge part of our identity is shaped by the people around us. We all fall into familiar roles without even realising it. We become the sensible one in the family, the organised one at work, the one who always keeps everyone laughing or the person who never minds where everyone else wants to eat. There is nothing unusual about that. Human beings are social creatures, and we naturally adapt our behaviour to fit the groups we belong to.

When you travel solo, all of those familiar reference points disappear.

Nobody knows what you do for a living, who your friends are or what people expect from you. Nobody has already decided what kind of person you are or what role you normally play. For perhaps the first time in years, every decision is yours, made without the subtle influence of the people who usually surround you. That isn’t because you’ve become a different person overnight. It’s because you’ve temporarily removed the environment that has quietly been shaping your decisions for years.

That has an interesting psychological effect. Instead of constantly responding to other people’s expectations, you begin paying much closer attention to your own interests, values and curiosity. You stop asking what everybody else wants to do and start asking yourself what genuinely appeals to you. Which museum do you actually want to visit? How long do you want to stay in this city? Do you really want to climb that mountain, or were you only considering it because everyone else was?

Those might seem like small decisions, but together they reveal something much bigger. The more time you spend making choices entirely for yourself, the more you begin to understand what you genuinely enjoy, what motivates you and what kind of traveller you really are. That self-awareness doesn’t disappear when the trip ends either. It follows you home, making you more comfortable trusting your own judgement and a little less concerned about whether your choices fit somebody else’s expectations.

That, I suspect, is what people are really trying to describe when they say solo travel helps you “find yourself.” You don’t discover some hidden version of your personality waiting on the other side of the world. You simply spend enough uninterrupted time making your own decisions that you gain a much clearer understanding of who you already were all along.

You Learn To Enjoy Your Own Company

One of the strangest things solo travel teaches you has nothing to do with travel at all. It teaches you that being alone and being lonely are completely different things, even though most people use the words as if they mean the same thing. They don’t.

Modern life gives us remarkably little opportunity to spend genuine time alone. We move between work, family and friends, and whenever there is the slightest gap in the day we instinctively fill it with music, podcasts, social media or endless notifications demanding our attention. Even when we’re physically alone, we’re rarely by ourselves for very long because we’ve become so accustomed to constant stimulation that silence starts to feel uncomfortable.

That isn’t because solitude is unpleasant. It’s because we’ve forgotten how to experience it.

Solo travel quietly reverses that process. There are long train journeys where your only entertainment is the landscape rolling past the window, afternoons wandering unfamiliar streets without any particular destination, meals eaten at a table for one and evenings sitting somewhere beautiful with nobody to interrupt your thoughts. Those moments can feel unusual at first simply because they’re unfamiliar, but before long they stop feeling like empty spaces in your day and start becoming some of the moments you value most.

There is a growing body of psychological research suggesting that many people are surprisingly uncomfortable being alone with their own thoughts, often preferring almost any distraction instead. Yet the ability to enjoy solitude is consistently linked with greater self-awareness, emotional resilience and wellbeing, and this is what solo travel can give you.

It gives you time and permission to slow down, to be more present. It removes a lot of the everyday distractions that take up our time, space and energy, and replaces it with something more natural, something that we have largely forgotten in modern life. Purposeful solitude.

This does not mean you will be lonely, far from it. The longer you travel alone, the more obvious the distinction becomes. Loneliness is wanting company and not having it. Solitude is choosing your own company and enjoying it. Those are entirely different emotional experiences, and learning that difference is one of the most valuable things solo travel has ever taught me.

Ironically, becoming comfortable on your own often improves the time you spend with other people as well. When you no longer need company simply to avoid being alone, you begin choosing it for the right reasons. Conversations become more meaningful, friendships become more genuine and you stop measuring your happiness by how many people happen to be around you.

That is one of the reasons solo travel stays with people long after they come home. Learning to enjoy your own company isn’t just a travel skill. It changes the relationship you have with yourself, and that quietly influences every other relationship in your life.

You Stop Living By Other People’s Expectations

One of these influences is realising just how much of our lives is shaped by other people’s expectations without us ever realising it. We all like to think we’re fiercely independent, making our own decisions and living life on our own terms, but the reality is usually far more complicated. Most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time worrying about what other people might think, whether we’re making the ‘right’ choice or whether we’re somehow falling behind everyone else. We get caught up in our interpersonal roles, we let our job roles define who we are and how we behave.

Solo travel has a habit of stripping all of that away.

There is nobody telling you where you should go next, what attractions are worth seeing or whether you’re spending too much time in one place. Nobody is judging your itinerary because there isn’t one. If you want to spend three days wandering around ancient ruins, do it. If you’d rather spend the afternoon sitting in a café watching the world go by than ticking another famous landmark off a list, that’s entirely your decision. No one will judge you for ordering that second dessert. The strange thing is that, after a while, you stop asking yourself what you should be doing and start paying much more attention to what you actually want to do.

That is surprisingly liberating because most of us spend our everyday lives doing exactly the opposite. We choose careers because they’re sensible, hobbies because they’re socially acceptable and holidays just because they’re what everyone else seems to be doing. Even when we believe we’re making independent decisions, we’re often being gently steered by social expectations, cultural norms and the quiet desire to fit in. There is nothing inherently wrong with that; we all need to belong. The problem comes when every decision is filtered through what other people expect of us, because over time it becomes remarkably easy to lose sight of what we actually want ourselves.

That is why giving yourself permission to step away from those expectations for a while is so healthy. Solo travel creates a rare opportunity to put your own needs, interests and curiosity first without feeling guilty about it. You don’t have to justify your choices, explain yourself or compromise because somebody else would rather be doing something different. For a few weeks or a few months, you can give yourself permission to be unapologetically selfish, and I mean that in the healthiest possible sense of the word. Most of us spend so much of our lives looking after partners, children, family, colleagues or friends that we rarely stop to ask ourselves what we genuinely need. Solo travel gives you that opportunity.

The irony is that learning to prioritise yourself every now and then doesn’t make you more selfish when you get home. Quite the opposite. It gives you a much clearer understanding of what genuinely matters to you, which makes it far easier to recognise when compromise is worthwhile and when you’re simply living according to somebody else’s expectations. Once you know the difference, you stop asking for permission to live your own life.

You Become Far More Adaptable Than You Ever Thought Possible

Once you stop looking to other people for permission, approval or reassurance, something else quietly begins to happen. You start trusting yourself, and the only reason that trust develops is because you’re constantly proving to yourself that you can cope.

That is one of the biggest misconceptions about confidence. Most people think confidence comes first, and then you become capable. In reality, the opposite is usually true. Confidence is simply the product of accumulated experience. Every decision you make, every problem you solve and every unexpected situation you work your way through adds another small piece of evidence that you can probably handle whatever comes next.

Solo travel accelerates that process because there is nobody else making those decisions for you. Every day presents dozens of small choices, from navigating unfamiliar transport systems and deciding where to stay to working out what to do when your plans inevitably change. None of them are particularly extraordinary on their own, but together they force you to rely on your own judgement in a way that everyday life rarely does.

Psychologists refer to this as self-efficacy, the belief that you are capable of dealing with challenges as they arise. Unlike self-esteem, which is often about how we feel about ourselves, self-efficacy is built almost entirely through experience. It grows because you’ve done difficult things before and discovered that you were capable of doing them, not because somebody told you that you could.

That is why experienced solo travellers often appear so calm when things don’t go according to plan. It isn’t because they somehow avoid problems or possess some mysterious travel superpower. They’ve simply accumulated enough experience to know that, whatever has just happened, they’ll probably find a solution. They’ve missed buses before. They’ve changed plans before. They’ve been lost before. None of those experiences made them less capable. If anything, they became the reason they trust themselves today.

That lesson reaches far beyond travel. Once you’ve spent weeks or months making decisions independently, adapting when circumstances change and repeatedly proving to yourself that you can cope, it becomes much harder to believe that you’re incapable of dealing with the challenges waiting for you back home. The destinations eventually fade into memories, but that quiet trust in your own ability has a habit of staying with you for a very long time.

You Connect With More People, Not Fewer

One of the great ironies of solo travel is that spending more time alone often leads to spending more time with other people. It seems completely counterintuitive, but once you’ve travelled solo for any length of time you realise it happens almost by accident.

When we travel with friends, partners or family, we naturally stay within that group. We eat together, explore together and talk to each other while waiting for buses or sitting in cafés. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but it creates a perfectly normal social bubble. Because we’re already engaged in conversation with the people we know, there is very little reason for anybody else to interrupt us, and equally little reason for us to seek out conversations with strangers.

Travelling alone quietly removes that barrier.

Without the comfort of familiar company, you become far more open to the people around you. You start chatting to the person sitting next to you on a long train journey, strike up conversations while waiting for a walking tour to begin or end up sharing dinner with people you met only a few hours earlier in a hostel common room. None of those interactions feel forced because they aren’t. They happen naturally when you’re open to them, and other travellers are often far more likely to start a conversation with somebody on their own than with a group that already looks busy.

The interesting thing is that this isn’t just about meeting other backpackers. It changes the way you interact with local people too. You’re more likely to ask questions, accept recommendations, linger in conversations or be invited into experiences you might otherwise have missed. Without realising it, you become a more active participant in the places you’re visiting instead of simply passing through them.

That doesn’t mean every conversation becomes a lifelong friendship, and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to spend every evening being the most sociable person in the hostel. Some of the people you meet will be part of your life for a few hours, some for just a night, some for a few weeks and a handful may remain friends for years afterwards. Most of those encounters are brief, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable. Often it’s those unexpected conversations with complete strangers that become some of the stories you remember long after you’ve forgotten which museum you visited on a Tuesday afternoon.

The irony is that learning to enjoy your own company and feeling comfortable in that solituide, often makes those connections feel more genuine. You’re no longer talking to people because you’re trying to avoid being alone. You’re talking to them because you’re genuinely interested in them, and that simple change in mindset makes every interaction feel more authentic.

Every Trip Becomes Completely Your Own

By the time you’ve learned to trust your own judgement, another subtle shift begins to happen. You stop travelling according to somebody else’s idea of what a successful trip looks like and start building experiences that genuinely reflect your own interests, curiosity and personality. That sounds obvious, but most of us have rarely travelled like that.

When you’re travelling with other people, compromise is inevitable. One person wants to spend the day in museums while another would rather be on the beach. Somebody is desperate to see every famous landmark, while somebody else just wants to wander aimlessly through quiet backstreets. Those compromises are a perfectly normal part of travelling together, and many of my favourite trips have been shared with other people because those memories become part of the experience too.

Travelling solo removes the need for those compromises, but the real benefit isn’t simply that you get your own way. The more important change is that you stop making decisions based on what everybody else wants and start following your own curiosity instead. If you lose an afternoon browsing an old bookshop, nobody is waiting impatiently outside. If you discover a tiny family-run restaurant and end up talking to the owner for three hours, there is nobody wondering when you’re finally going to leave. If you arrive somewhere and immediately know you want to stay another week, you don’t need to persuade anyone that changing your plans is a good idea.

What starts as freedom gradually becomes something much more personal. You begin to recognise the places that genuinely excite you, the pace that suits you and the experiences that leave the strongest impression. Some people discover they love slow travel, spending weeks getting to know a single place. Others realise they’re happiest hiking through remote landscapes, exploring museums for hours or sitting in neighbourhood cafés watching everyday life unfold. None of those approaches are inherently better than the others because the point isn’t how you travel. The point is that, perhaps for the first time, you’re travelling in a way that feels completely authentic to you.

That authenticity is difficult to put into words until you’ve experienced it. The trip gradually stops feeling like a checklist of places to visit or photographs to collect and becomes something far more personal. Instead of chasing the experiences you think you’re supposed to have, you start paying attention to the ones that genuinely resonate with you, and those are almost always the memories that stay with you long after you’ve returned home.

I think that’s one of the reasons so many people struggle to go back once they’ve experienced solo travel. It isn’t because travelling with other people suddenly becomes less enjoyable. It’s because they’ve discovered what it feels like to experience the world entirely on their own terms, and that is an incredibly difficult feeling to give up.

Why Everyone Should Travel Solo At Least Once

By now it has probably become obvious that I don’t think solo travel is simply another way to see the world. I genuinely believe it is something every traveller should experience at least once, not because it is somehow better than travelling with friends or a partner, but because it offers something completely different.

Very few experiences encourage you to understand yourself a little better, trust your own judgement, stop worrying so much about other people’s expectations and become genuinely comfortable in your own company. Fewer still leave you with lessons that continue shaping your life long after you’ve unpacked your backpack and gone back to work. The destinations are wonderful, of course, but they are only part of the story. The real transformation often happens much more quietly, through hundreds of small decisions, unexpected conversations, solved problems and moments of reflection that gradually change the way you see both yourself and the world around you.

Will every day be perfect? Of course not. You’ll still get lost, miss buses, have evenings where you question what you’re doing and moments where nothing seems to go according to plan. None of those experiences diminish the journey. If anything, they become part of the reason it stays with you, because growth rarely comes from the days when everything was easy.

That is why I always encourage people not to wait. Don’t wait for the perfect travelling companion, the perfect opportunity or for somebody else to decide they’re finally ready to join you. Life has an annoying habit of making sure those perfect circumstances never quite arrive, and before you know it another year has slipped by and the journey you’ve always dreamed about is still exactly where you left it: somewhere on a list of things you’ll do one day.

Go. Not because solo travel is perfect, but because it isn’t. Because it will challenge you, frustrate you, surprise you and reward you in equal measure. Because it will introduce you to remarkable places, remarkable people and experiences you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

That, more than anything else, is why solo travel is awesome. You don’t come home because the world has changed. You come home because you have, and once you’ve experienced that, it’s very difficult to look at travel, or anything else, in quite the same way again.