The women who surprise me most are the ones who’ve been thinking about solo travel for years. Not days, not months. Years.
They’ve bookmarked trips. They’ve looked at dates. They’ve got as far as opening a browser tab, and then closed it again. Because something stops them. Usually it’s the same thing.
The feeling that it’s somehow too late to start.
It isn’t. And if anything, the women who come to Sages in their 40s, 50s and 60s get more out of it than anyone.
Here’s what I mean.
You stop caring about the wrong things
There’s a particular freedom that tends to arrive somewhere in your 40s. You stop worrying quite so much about what other people think. You care less about looking effortless and more about actually enjoying yourself. You’ve earned a certain level of self-knowledge that comes from actually living your life.
That changes everything about solo travel. You’re not trying to impress anyone. You’re not performing an experience for social media. You’re just there, actually present, actually taking it in.
The women I watch have the best time at Sages are almost always in this category.
Solo does not mean alone
This is the thing that stops most women from booking, and the thing they laugh about most by day two.
Solo travellers make up the majority of every Sages group. Not a small minority. The majority. So the idea that you’ll be the odd one out, sitting alone at dinner while everyone else already knows each other, just doesn’t hold.
One guest put it better than I can. She wrote afterwards: “I came alone which was not an issue as the atmosphere is so welcoming and friendly that solo didn’t mean alone. Very quickly we all bonded and shared life stories, becoming friends.”
Another arrived not knowing a single person and left writing: “I arrived alone and left with 11 close friends and a lust for looking after my body.”
That’s not unusual. That’s the norm.
You’ve waited long enough to know what you actually need
Women who’ve been running on empty for years tend to arrive knowing exactly what they need. Rest. Movement that feels good. Space to think. Conversations that go somewhere real. Time that belongs entirely to them.
They’ve spent long enough putting everyone else first to know what it feels like when that shifts, even briefly. And they know, in a way that’s hard to articulate until you’ve lived it, how rare that is.
That clarity makes for a different kind of week. More intentional. More appreciated. More deeply felt.
The age gap doesn’t matter the way you think it will
I’ve had women on the same retreat ranging from their mid 30s to their late 50s and even 60s, and within two days you’d struggle to tell who was who. Something about the shared experience levels it quickly. The conversations that happen over dinner, around the pool, on the yoga mat, don’t follow the rules of ordinary social life. They go deeper than that.
Women often tell me they made friends at Sages that they wouldn’t have met anywhere else, in any other context, at any other stage of life. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of.
The only thing that stops most women is waiting too long
If you’ve been thinking about solo travel and haven’t done it yet, you’re not behind. You’re exactly where most women are when they first contact me. A little curious, a little nervous, wondering if now is the right time.
It usually is.
Sages Retreats runs small group retreats for women in Bali and Portugal. If you have questions before booking, chat to Lucy directly on WhatsApp. She answers every message herself.