The solo travel boom isn't new to us. We just didn't have the stats yet.
I sat down live on BBC Radio Lancashire as a travel expert to talk about the solo travel boom . The headlines, the search data, the shift in who's booking a trip on their own and why. It's a genuinely interesting story. But sitting on that call, there was a version of it I couldn't quite say out loud on a regional, daytime radio show: the ENM and swinger community got here years before the mainstream did.
The numbers on the solo travel trend
The headline claim doing the rounds is that "solo travel has doubled in the last decade" and goes back to Go2Africa's Luxury Solo Travel Report, which found global Google search interest for "solo travel" up 230% over ten years, peaking at 1.6 million searches in January 2026. To be precise about what that actually measures: that's search interest, not confirmed bookings. People are curious about solo travel in numbers we've genuinely never seen before. Whether they're all following through and booking is a separate question.
ABTA’s Holiday Habits booking data backs the trend up regardless. Their research shows UK solo travellers rising from 13% in 2019 to 16% in 2023. The sharpest jump is in Millenials, the 35-44 bracket. Solo travel more than doubled year-on-year, from 6% in 2022 to 13% in 2023. That's not students backpacking; that's people mid-career, maybe mid-relationship-status of some kind, choosing to travel alone on purpose. Solo bookings in UK destinations are up roughly 42% across two years of trade data, and Airbnb currently lists the UK as its top trending solo-travel destination worldwide.
The age data cuts both ways, too. 25-34 year-olds have the highest overall solo participation at 19%. But the figures Graham quoted live on air ; 55-64 up 118%, 75+ up 87%, came from a source I'd flag as one to treat with a little caution. It was part of the interview's briefing and I used it live, but I'd want to see it independently verified before leaning on it too hard in writing. The direction of travel is clear either way: this isn't a young person's trend anymore, if it ever really was.
Interestingly women are making up somewhere between 70-85% of solo travellers by volume, and 54.6% by spend, according to Grand View Research. While Airbnb's data shows female solo bookings up over 30% year-on-year, against just 12% for men. Per person solo travellers are higher spenders, spending around 42.8% more per person than couples do, per Go2Africa’s Luxury Solo Travel Report. With typical solo budgets sit somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000, excluding flights.
Why the increase in solo travel trend doesn’t surprise us
Here's the thing the mainstream press coverage keeps missing: solo travel isn't a new behaviour to the swinger community. It's something a lot of us have been doing for years, quietly, without a trend piece to explain it.
Plenty of couples in this space travel solo even while partnered. To an event, a cruise, or a destination because independence and separate interests were never a threat to the relationship, they were part of how it worked. Meeting people on your own terms, without your partner needing to be in the room for it to be legitimate, is something swingers figured out long before "solo travel" became a search term with a report attached.
The stigma story is the same one, just told about a different group. Mainstream travel media frames the rise of solo travel as women (and increasingly everyone) shrugging off the old idea that travelling alone means something's missing in your life. That's almost word-for-word the same shift the swinger community has been through with non-monogamy itself. The assumption that wanting independence, or wanting to meet people outside your relationship, must mean something's broken. It doesn't. It never did. The rest of the world's just catching up to a conversation we've been having for a while.
What this means if you're already a swinger
If you're an established couple who already travels this way, solo nights, solo trips, meeting people independently even while committed. You're not behind a trend, you're ahead of one. The data confirms what you already knew: doing your own thing on a trip, on your own terms, isn't a red flag. It's increasingly just what confident and secure people do.
If you're newer to this and solo travel as a swinger still feels like a big step, the numbers are a reminder that "alone" doesn't mean "unsafe" or "reckless." It means chosen. Millions of people, across every age bracket, are arriving at the same conclusion from a completely different starting point.
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