The Explosive Growth of the Women’s Travel Market

Condé Nast Traveler, March 8, 2017

Not only is women’s travel “a thing”; it’s growing by leaps and bounds. About a year ago, Condé Nast Travel published an article, “Women Are Becoming More Adventurous Travelers—and Doing It Alone.” Although the piece focused on solo tours and adventure travel, it nicely captures the increasing number of women seeking out vacation experiences just for them.

• REI Adventures reported that since 2010, women traveling with their company rose 60%, with 58% of total guests in 2016 being women. This prompted REI Adventures to design a new series of trips just for women adventure travelers.
• VBT Bicycling and Walking Vacations, cited 60 percent of its customers are women and have seen about 5 percent growth in female travelers year over year
• Country Walkers’ participants are 67 percent female with similar growth stats as VBT.
• Intrepid Travel had seen a 35 percent increase in women booking trips in first quarter 2017 (when the article was published).
• DuVine Cycling + Adventure Co, a luxury cycling operator, had a 35 percent increase in female travelers over the past three years, which prompted them to launch a women-only Sonoma Wine Country tour.

An interesting byproduct of women traveling more and on their own is the growth of female tour leaders and adventure guides from hiking the Grand Canyon to exploring different cultures in places like Egypt, India and beyond.

The Condé Nast Traveler piece ends with a quote from Deborah Kilcollins of Big Five Tours and Expeditions:

When women travel together, they tend to be a more cohesive and closer-knit group than mixed groups. They support each other and encourage each other to try something that they may have never done before. [It’s] a win-win for all women.

The camaraderie fostered by women traveling together is a common theme among tour operators featured in the articles I’ve posted to date. It’s one of the unique facets of this travel trend. In a world where we now talk about “safe spaces”, tours for women appear to be the ultimate “safe space” whether hiking up Kilimanjaro or exploring a foreign city for the first time. Now we just need to take the friction out of the discovery process for all.

If you’d like to read the entire Condé Nast Traveler article, click here.

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