Survey: Women Traveling Solo Still Feeling Unsafe

Women traveling solo still feel unsafe compared to men, found a survey released on occasion of International Women’s Day recently by airline tickets app WayAway.

More specifically, four times as many women felt traveling alone was not safe compared to their male counterparts despite the increase in Google searches for solo female travel.

In view of the findings, WayAway is calling on the travel tech industry to innovate harder when it comes to safe-travel tools for women and to find ways to solve the challenges that female solo travelers face.

Describing the situation as a “worrying problem” and in response to this year’s UN Women theme “DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality”, WayAway said better travel planning tools that allow women to feel comfortable when traveling alone are necessary.

Under the theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, the United Nations Observance of International Women’s Day 2023 will highlight the need for inclusive and transformative technology and digital education. Photo source: UN Trust Fund/Phil Borges.

 Key takeaways

According to the WayAway study:

• Google searches for solo travel have quadrupled in last 10 years
• four times as many women as men felt that traveling alone is unsafe
• research shows that too many of those females who do travel alone do so by “internalizing the normality of unsafety” and that their fears have “overall negative effects on travel intentions”.

“We find it shocking that over 100 years since the first International Women’s Day, so many females still don’t feel as comfortable as men when it comes to travelling alone,” said WayAway Head of PR & Communications Janis Dzenis.

“When it comes to travel, it would seem that almost every possible tool has been invented for every possible niche but somehow for female solo travelers the technology on offer is, with few exceptions, pretty substandard and most importantly far from universally available,” she adds, noting that very few travel websites have filters that might cater to women’s needs or that allow users to see female-only commentaries and ratings.

Travel tech industry should solve challenges female solo travellers face

Dzenis goes on to add that travel technology companies that do make changes will be in for “a huge financial reward” as “female travelers will naturally gravitate towards, perhaps even swamp, travel platforms that can offer them the reassurances they understandably crave”.

Among others, in efforts to ensure female traveler safety, WayAway has developed maps that highlight neighborhoods that might be ‘no go areas’ due to higher than average crime rates or user feedback.