Beth Santos, author of the solo female traveler’s manifesto “Wander Woman” and founder of the Wanderful community, explodes the myth that women should be afraid to travel.
“Society makes women believe traveling alone isn’t normal, but there are lots of women out there traveling,” she says. “Women actually dominate the travel industry. We make 80 to 82 percent of travel purchasing decisions.”
Indeed, one recent study even found that 71 percent of solo travelers are now female. Solo travel can be a powerful vehicle for women’s healing, growth, and personal development — a fact Santos knows from personal experience.
The importance of solo female travel
Santos’ passion for travel began during her junior year abroad in Portugal.
“That was my first real solo trip, my first time getting out there in the world,” she says. “Part of me opened up in a way I had never experienced before. I got this magical feeling of connecting with a part of myself I hadn’t known existed.”
For Santos, traveling solo for the first time was a deeply meaningful experience, which is why she advocates for more women to do it.
“That first solo trip is a really pronounced experience,” she explains. “You’re out in the world by yourself for the first time, and everything is right up against your face. You experience everything firsthand, and it becomes very personal. Those solo travel experiences are not only the things we remember and affect us but also present opportunities to learn and grow. As women, we don’t always give ourselves those kinds of experiences. That’s why I’ve gotten very vocal and feel strongly about encouraging women, no matter what their age, to spend time traveling solo.”
Santos also began writing about her travel experiences during her junior year abroad. However, she didn’t start her famous travel blog until her next major excursion.
Launching a travel blog to represent women all over the world
“In 2009, about a year after graduating from college, I moved to a small country called São Tomé and Príncipe,” Santos remembers. “It’s a two-island nation off the west coast of Africa, and I moved there on a whim. I didn’t know anything about São Tomé except that it was Portuguese-speaking.”
These experiences made Santos realize that women’s realities in other countries are very different from those in the US. “Women are treated differently in every country we go to,” she explains. “When I say different, I don’t mean different from men. Every single place we travel to, we have different experiences and encounter different realities, so I started to document that. What really galvanized me was the lack of representation for women’s experience worldwide.”
Those initial essays were the beginning of “Go Girl,” the travel blog that eventually morphed into “Wanderful.”
“I shared some of my own stories about being a woman in the world and brought in other women writers to share their stories,” Santos explains. “We had women from around the world sharing what their experiences were like. Blogs were different back then — they were online journals. They were just raw places where we could share our feelings, experiences, and some of our advice, but it wasn’t as journalistic as it is now.”
“Go Girl” evolved into “Wanderful,” which has since grown into an entire community.
Launching the Wanderful community of female travelers
“It was just me writing, sharing my story, and connecting with other women in this new way,” Santos recalls. “Eventually, we had a Facebook group, and as that evolved, it became a solution to the problem of feeling disconnected or maybe even lonely as a female traveler.”
Another key turning point came when Santos helped host a fundraiser for a small international nonprofit.
“Women who loved to travel gathered together at this event,” she says. “I remember looking out into the room, seeing all these women talking in an animated way, and feeling so supported and nurtured by this environment. I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, we have to give women a chance to connect with each other even more in this way.’”
As a result, Santos started hosting regular meetups for the Wanderful community in Chicago. These were so successful that others sprung up in New York and Boston. “Our chapter network started to build out quickly,” she remembers. “We connect women around the world to help give them access to each other.”
The community soon expanded in new directions. “We offer planned trips and experiences, as well as an online community where members can learn from one another,” Santos explains. “We also have special deals with travel partners worldwide and virtual events where members can learn travel tools and tactics.”
In addition, the Wanderful community has become the go-to gathering place for travel-themed content creators. “We hosted the first WITS Creator Summit — which was called the Women in Travel Summit back then — in Chicago in 2014,” Santos says. “We were amazed by how many people showed up. We brought 183 people to Chicago, which was a huge number of people for what we were expecting.”
Wanderful supports female travel content creators from all backgrounds and empowers them to take their seat at the table. “We take our creators and amplify their stories, helping them build businesses out of using their voices to make the travel industry better,” Santos explains.
As if that wasn’t enough, Santos also wrote and published Wander Woman, a nonfiction book that encourages women to travel solo.
Choose solo travel
In short, Santos wants women to give themselves more credit and trust themselves to travel solo.
“Traveling alone isn’t something that happens to you,” she says. “It can actually be something you choose. You can choose to travel with yourself — you can be a good travel partner. You can be fun and interesting to travel with. You don’t always have to travel with somebody else. It doesn’t matter what your relationship status is or what your commitments are. Traveling alone can be nurturing and healing, and it can allow you to focus on yourself and to get to know yourself in a way you’re not able to do in the context of home and family and your relationships.”
While buying a plane ticket to fly across the world might seem too daunting for some, Santos emphasizes that traveling alone doesn’t have to happen thousands of miles away.
“It can happen across the street or across town,” she says. “It consists of three things: challenging your preconceptions, trying something new, and putting yourself in a position of discomfort and learning. If you can do those things, no matter where you are in the world, that is travel too.”
