Newsletters: Why women love to travel alone

I still remember how my stomach sank when I parted ways with my friend Cristina in Rome and headed to Barcelona alone. I was 20 years old and not sure I was capable. But I desperately wanted to reach Spain before heading back to Brighton, England, where I was an exchange student. Navigating the public transit system, making my way to Sagrada Familia, and using the vosotros form of Spanish (which US Spanish teachers rarely teach) proved daunting. But I did it!

Traveling alone is a confidence booster, and more women are taking off solo all over the globe. In fact, women are now more likely to travel alone than men are. Aditi Shrikant explains why and what women gain from these solitary journeys.

—Nadra Nittle, reporter at The Goods

Focus groups shape what we buy. But how much do they really say about us?

Sarah Lawrence for Vox

Think about the items you put in your cart during your last trip to the grocery store. Recall the new fast-food value meal you saw in a commercial, or the app you use to check your bank account balance, or the packaging of the shampoo you purchase for your dog. It's extremely likely that sometime before any of these products saw the light of day, a half-dozen or so strangers got together, sat down in a conference room with a one-way mirror, and debated their merits in exchange for a couple hundred dollars each.

We now live firmly in the age of big data. Every link we click is tracked and cataloged. We rate our Uber drivers and the things we buy on Amazon and the cleanliness of airport bathrooms. The movies and TV shows we're prompted to stream on Netflix are based on algorithms that analyze everything we've ever watched before. But when designers and marketers need to come up with new ideas or vet products before trying to sell them, they still turn to the same lo-fi method that's been in use for decades: putting a bunch of people in a room and having them hash it out as part of a focus group.

Focus groups might seem like a throwback — they came to prominence in the middle of the last century — and their demise has been predicted many times over in recent years. But for as many times as they've been declared dead, a victim of ever-improving digital analytics, they haven't gone anywhere. In 2017, $2.2 billion worldwide was spent on conducting focus groups, according to the trade group ESOMAR, with $809 million of that coming in the US.

Read the rest of the story >>

Women travel alone more than men. Here's why.

Getty Images/Tetra images RF

Of the 151 countries Jessica Nabongo has traveled to, 47 of them have been solo trips. In her quest to be the first black woman to visit every nation in the world, sometimes she's had to go it alone. But this isn't something she minds.

"The thing is when you travel with people, you're not trying to meet new people — you are focused on exploring places with your friends," she says. "Whereas when I'm traveling alone, I'm much more inclined to meet new people and I definitely make deeper connections with people in the countries that I'm visiting."

Nabongo is one of many women who are embracing solo travel. According to a 2014 Booking.com survey, 72 percent of American women like to travel solo. The research company Hitwise found that the 55 percent solo travel searches in the United Kingdom are made by women, driven in particular by women ages 25 to 34 living in London.

You'll find the most prominent manifestation of this trend on your Instagram feed: a slew of square frames, each holding a lone woman plus a Portuguese beach or a Colorado mountaintop or an Indonesian hut. Women today have more means and fewer obligations than women of past generations. Logistically, travel is just more doable. But it's not just increased access and time that prompts women to travel; it's the perception that travel is self-care. Taking a vacation is a shortcut to wellness and self-actualization, two things in which women are investing lots of time and money.

Read the rest of the story >>