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Sunday insight

Women are 84% of solo travellers. The industry is still building for someone else.

Sunday 10 August 2026 The thesis ≈ 6 min read

The most valuable guest in wellness travel is asking for a table she can sit at alone. This week she told us, unprompted, that nobody understands the brief.

Meanwhile $3.8 billion of capital went somewhere else entirely.

A warm travertine hotel lobby at golden hour with palms and designer seating
BUILT FOR SOMEONE ELSE.
A note to start

Hi, I'm Hannah, founder of Oyogo — and this is our Oyogo Edit.

Every Sunday, me and the team take one idea or one property from the world of wellbeing travel and living, and tell you the truth about it: the thesis, the numbers, the honest verdict. From time to time we'll bring in experts too, for their read on a property or a trend worth watching.

This week's is close to home. I travel alone a lot, and so do most of my friends.

So when I say the industry is overlooking the largest segment in solo travel, I'm not reporting that from the outside. I'm describing checking in and being asked, gently, whether anyone else will be joining me. Paying for a room built for two because I arrived on my own. And dinner — the reservation that takes a second attempt, the table by the kitchen, the sense that eating alone is a problem the restaurant is solving on your behalf rather than an evening you actively chose.

None of it is expensive to fix. Not one of those three things needs a capital budget, a diagnostics suite, or another thousand square feet of spa.

Then we posted about it on Instagram, and the comments arrived — and it turns out a great many women have had exactly the same evening.

Let's unpack it.

— Hannah

84%Of all solo travellers worldwide are women
$31.8tnControlled by women over 50 today
75%Of discretionary spending, women over 50, by 2028
70%Of global travel spending, influenced by women
131%Growth in "solo female travel" searches in a year

A woman of sixty-five, who has been travelling alone for three decades:

I'm 65 now and have been solo travelling for over 30 years. I love everything about it. Although, I do wish we had room discounts for only being one person, instead of paying for a room for two.

Another, a decade into it:

Despite a lot more choice now, I still don't think many are understanding the brief.

And a third, plainly:

As much as I want to get away, the prices are too expensive for being solo.

Three separate people, unprompted, in one thread. It became our most-engaged post of the month, and every one of them was describing a version of the same evening I have had.

Not a niche complaint from the edge of the market — the single highest-spending guest in wellness hospitality, telling an industry currently deploying billions of dollars that it is building for somebody else.

— Hannah Paradise, Founder, Oyogo

All comments here are from our own post and are quoted without names.

Who she actually is

The numbers are not marginal, and they are not new. They are simply not being designed around.

Women are 84% of all solo travellers worldwide (Grand View Research). Searches for "solo female travel" rose 131% in a single year. Boston Consulting Group puts women behind 70% of global travel spending.

And the spending figure everyone quotes is narrower, and better, than the version in circulation. NielsenIQ's projection is not about women generally — it is that women over 50 will control 75% of discretionary spending by 2028, and already control an estimated $31.8 trillion worldwide.

Read that twice. The wealthiest consumer cohort on earth is older women. The largest segment in solo travel is women. These are substantially the same people.

On spend, one figure gets quoted constantly and deserves a caveat. A survey by AdventureWomen — a company that sells guided trips to women — found respondents aged 35 to 75 planning to spend an average of $18,000 per trip in 2026. That is a vendor surveying its own customers, so read it as a signal about the premium end rather than a market average. It is still a striking number for the segment most operators treat as an afterthought.

We can add one first-party data point. Our own audience is 66.6% women, with 31.6% aged 45 and over — and the posts that consistently travel furthest are the ones about property and place, not treatments.

So: the biggest segment, the oldest and wealthiest cohort, the fastest-growing search term, and the person who will control three quarters of the money within two years.

And she is still, by her own account, walking into rooms designed around a couple.

The demand is not in doubt either. Simon-Kucher's 2026 global travel study found 44% of high-income travellers took a wellness trip in 2025, against 21% of lower-income travellers. For 2026 the gap widens sharply: 58% of high-income travellers are planning one, against 26%. The money and the intent are both concentrated in precisely her bracket.

The cohort is in midlife. Almost nobody programmes for it.

Here is the part the spending figures obscure.

This is not a young market, and the imagery the industry uses to sell it is roughly two decades out.

Return to the NielsenIQ number: women over 50 are the cohort with 75% of discretionary spending. A woman in her fifties is also navigating sleep that has changed, a body composition that has changed, temperature regulation that has changed, and a medical establishment that has historically had very little to say about any of it.

So the wealthiest guest in the market has a specific, well-documented, entirely predictable set of needs — and almost nobody is programming for them.

You do not need a survey to know the cohort is there. You can read it off what is being built for them. Six Senses runs three, five and seven-day female wellness programmes covering perimenopause and menopause. Canyon Ranch runs a physician-led four-day immersive. Miraval programmes midlife directly — Making Sense of Menopause, Better Sleep in Menopause and Beyond. Independent retreats like Midlyfe are building whole businesses on it, at $3,400 per person.

When Six Senses, Canyon Ranch and Miraval all build the same thing independently, that is a demand signal — and a handful of operators is not a category response. It is a gap.

Every operator currently costing a diagnostics suite might reasonably ask whether the highest-value programming decision available is considerably less exotic than that, and is sitting in plain sight in their own guest age profile. Pull the ages of your solo bookings from the last year before you sign anything.

What the industry spent its money on instead

Now hold that against where the capital actually went this fortnight.

On 4 August, Procter & Gamble agreed to pay US$3.8 billion in cash for Thorne, a supplements brand selling through practitioners, gyms and longevity clinics. The same week, a 59,000 sq ft spa opened at the Park Hyatt Cabo del Sol, billed as the region's largest. In Tuscany, Terme di Saturnia committed €15m and launched a Longevity Score built on genetic testing and sleep studies.

Sensible bets, all of them. PwC caught the logic exactly — hospitality M&A volume down 2.5%, yet upscale-and-above assets taking 73% of transactions. Their Jonathan Shing: "Five years ago, the physical asset was the deal. Today, the asset is half the deal. The other half is the data."

And not one of those decisions was made by asking the woman with $31.8 trillion behind her what would make her book again.

The returns rather make the point. ISPA recorded a record US$23.5bn US spa year in 2025 — on 191 million visits, against 192 million in 2019. Growth from price, not people. RLA Global, across more than 13,000 hotels, found properties with a smaller wellness offer out-earning the destination-spa model on rate, revenue and profit simultaneously for the first time.

Bigger is not working. And the guest who could fund all of it is in the comments asking for a table she can sit at.

What she actually said she wants

Read the thread properly and it is not complicated, and it is not expensive.

A retreat host, on what the outcome actually looks like months later:

I love the texts that come a few months after the retreats — people who met, who live near one another, kayaking together, or even travelling to other places together. Community rooted in intention.

That is the whole argument. The measurable result of a good solo stay showed up months after checkout, in friendships that outlived the booking. No diagnostics suite captures that, and no spa is big enough to manufacture it.

One reader pushed back, and she was right to:

I'm curious how much of it is actually about women travelling alone versus people wanting to become more intentional about where and how they spend their time.

Fair. The solo framing may be the visible edge of something broader — guests who want intent designed into the whole stay, not decorated onto part of it. That makes the point larger, not smaller.

So: a programming problem and a pricing problem. Neither is solved by square footage.

The Oyogo verdict

Let's look at what solo costs at your property. If a single-occupancy supplement applies, ask whether it is defensible against a guest spending $18,000 a trip? Perhaps it is the cheapest signal available to understand who is booking — and most operators could start to address some of the below by Monday morning!?

Fix dinner. This is the one nobody costs and everybody feels. Perhaps a communal table with a host? A bar or table you can eat at properly that doesn't make you feel alone? A reservation system that does not treat a table for one as an error?

Train the front desk. "Just you this evening?" is meant kindly, but it doesn't land that way. Train guest experience to enthuse solo travellers — it costs nothing and adds guest value.

Programme options for one, and for all. A morning group run or a solo hike. Classes that are genuinely social, if she chooses them. The thing she is buying is an experience that works with or without a plus one. These are operating decisions, not capital ones.

Do the cheap things first. None of this is an argument against diagnostics — build the longevity lab if the numbers work. But dinner, the front desk and the room rate cost nothing, they are what she actually asked for, and they decide whether she books again. The spending isn't wrong. The order is.

Best for: operators with a capital budget and an assumption that a bigger spa is the answer.

Less suited to: anyone hoping the fix is another diagnostic. This one is programming, pricing and creating a sense of belonging!

Sources

Researched and drafted with AI assistance. Every source is named above; the editorial judgement and verdicts are ours. Reader comments are quoted from our own Instagram post, without names.

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