How Meg Jerrard’s Vision United 300K Women in Travel

In an enlightening conversation with Meg Jerrard, co-founder of Solo Female Travelers, we delve into the inspiring journey of this unique platform. Meg shares invaluable insights about the inception, evolution, and challenges of pioneering a community-centric travel initiative dedicated to women.

Aspiring bloggers and travel enthusiasts will find her experiences and advice particularly compelling, offering a glimpse into the world of blogging, community building, and the power of an idea turned into a global movement.

Inspiration and Conceptualization

SBS – What inspired you to create Solo Female Travelers, and how did you conceptualize the idea?

Meg – We are a for-profit company with a social impact mission and are excited to empower women through travel. We want to help shape the travel industry to be more equitable for women by supporting local female-owned & led businesses in amazing destinations around the world, and this is what inspired us to create the company, and what continues to keep us passionate about what we do.

Solo Female Travelers started as a Facebook group in 2015, and this was the first Facebook Group for women who travel solo. In a short six years, it became a global movement, and we are now a strong international community of over 300,000 women from 100 countries around the world.

As the group grew, one of the most common questions our members asked was about finding someone to travel with. Traveling solo is an enriching and empowering experience, but sometimes it’s even more enriching to have a like-minded travel buddy, someone to split the costs, share the experience, and make new friends with.

At this point, it was a no-brainer. Small women-only group trips have major potential among women for the safe space they provide and the option to share a room with another traveler and reduce the cost per person. They tackle all concerns and worries of women traveling solo and are a great way for them to dip their toes into the world of solo travel and to meet people without the stigma of being alone.

And they offer us an opportunity to make a real impact on gender equality in tourism by supporting female-owned businesses in the destinations we visit. 

So with that, SFT Tours was born.

Market Niche Identification

SBS – How did you identify the unique needs of solo female travelers that weren’t being met by the existing travel industry?

Meg – Every December, 5,000 women take part in the first Solo Female Travel Trends Survey to shed more light on the solo female travel experience. We are in a unique position with a strong Facebook Group and community to be able to run proper research to identify unique needs.

We have been running this survey every year since 2020, and it has become the largest, most comprehensive, and only global research study on solo female travel trends, preferences, and behaviors published, allowing us to learn a lot about what women want.

We realized that little comprehensive research is done on solo female travel trends, so we should step into the space and complete it ourselves. 

The purpose of the survey is to identify top preferences, interests, fears, and motivations surrounding solo travel for women and make the insights and data freely available to the travel industry so they can better serve women. Now in its fourth year, 10,000 industry professionals read the annual results.

Challenges in Niche Markets

SBS – What specific challenges did you face when targeting the niche market of solo female travelers?

Meg – In the context of targeting solo female travelers and staying true to our mission of genuinely supporting women, there are a lot of challenges in employing women in the travel industry, and hiring women is not as simple as signing a contract and paying a salary.

Below are some of the challenges of employing women, and these are the reasons other companies don’t hire women or hire only a few, where it is easy or cheaper to do so. They are also the reasons we are so passionate about making sure we do:

• A guide getting pregnant and having to be on bed rest for the first trimestre thus canceling a tour last minute
• Women taking maternity leave more often and longer than men do. No work = no pay in many countries if you are a guide. Tour companies will start reducing their commitments with you the moment you get pregnant because they know “what is coming” in terms of unreliability. Investing in training of a guide that then leaves the profession for two years, so the cycle needs to restart again with another guide
• A guide wanting to breastfeed her baby or pump milk while on tour, while some activities require them to be out and about all day, away from a fridge or private space to pump
• Guides facing stigma and negativity from friends and family for working outside the home as a guide when they have small children, and the pressure to leave that job and guides leaving us when they get married
• Guides, canceling last minute or having to leave a tour halfway because of a family emergency at home with children or an elder
• A porter wanting to work carrying luggage up Kilimanjaro while being heavily pregnant
• Hotel accommodations only having a dorm for the guides, and them being filled with 99% men since women don’t guide, thus putting women in a position of vulnerability and the same hotels not allowing the guides to sleep in the same rooms guests do

All of the above makes it much easier to hire men, and it is the reason why many companies stay away from female guides or female-owned companies. We don’t. 

In our short life as a tour company, we have already faced all of the above, and we haven’t resorted to hiring men. When we say we want to support women, WE MEAN IT, and we always find ways to make things work around their other jobs so they can continue to work and further their financial independence.

The only thing we need are guests who support our values and mission and are happy to work around the above challenges to support women and make the travel industry more equitable. And to be honest, we don’t think we are doing anything extraordinary.

We are decent human beings with empathy, compassion, and a real commitment to making things work. We simply listen to our female partners’ needs and provide them with flexibility, the antidote to the demands of the greedy job of raising a family.

• We are more patient and understanding, and we are used to problem-solving at the last minute
• We think outside the box and look for tailor-made solutions that work for each of our female partners rather than applying a blanket policy to all
• We join tours where the guide had a small baby so she could go home and pump or breastfeed during the tour
• We have guides bring their babies and mothers on tour so they can stay close to them and see them at night
• We have hired the husbands of guides (who are also guides) for walking tours when they had to be on unexpected bed rest last minute because of a risky pregnancy, so the family unit and her could continue to be supported
• We adapt our schedules and the duration of some of the activities on our itinerary to work around school schedules of a guide’s child
• We hire trainee guides, in addition to experienced guides, and provide them with on-the-job training so they are more appealing candidates for other companies
• We don’t make our guides exclusive. We are happy to share the contacts of all the women who make our trips special so anyone can engage in their services. And we love it when other companies hire them, too. We don’t keep them just for us, so we control the “market” and prevent other companies from hiring women
• We support new female-owned businesses when they are starting out, even when they are more expensive or harder to support than easier/cheaper male options
• We pay everyone above market rates and do not cheap them out of their well-deserved salaries because they are women
• We don’t make them live off tips or commissions from guest purchases, so they are forced to push guests into buying things they don’t need or which are of worse quality so they can earn a living wage
• Our guides sleep on the same bed our guests do (not literally). We do not send them to a cheaper hostel far away, so they need to wake up early, or put them in a dorm-style accommodation they have to share with stranger men (very common in the safari industry and when climbing Kilimanjaro)

Social Impact and Profit Balance

SBS – How do you balance the social impact mission with the for-profit nature of your business?

Meg – Our social impact mission is the core of everything we do. Everywhere we go, our guides are local, our itineraries immersive, and we eliminate the single supplement by pairing you with another Solo Female Traveler. 

This is not a marketing slogan or a selling tactic to get more women to feel good by booking a trip with us; this is the reason for our existence and the motivation for us to wake up every day and get out there to help shape the travel industry.

Without the obsession for profits of large corporations and their zeal for appearing to care about female empowerment, we can focus on having the most impact in whichever out-of-the-box way we feel will work.

Staying true to our values of female empowerment and using tourism as a force for good, we support female-owned/focused/led businesses and will partner with companies who align with our mission to empower women and make a positive local impact. 

We do our best to work directly with the local communities, so the cost of each trip goes to the people who make it extraordinary. We don’t believe in bringing a foreign guide from outside a community to run our tours, and all of our guests meet and are guided by local women and get to know the place through them. 

It truly is a jungle out there, and we once told one of our local tour partners that if we could not have female guides, we would simply not do the tour. We don’t have bad business acumen. We just take our mission to heart.

Yes, our guests are incredibly important to us, and they are the ones we strive to provide experiences of a lifetime, and they are the ones who make it all possible. But the whole reason we launched tours in the first place was so that we could support women at the destinations we visit so that we could say, “We empower women through travel”

That is our mission. 

We don’t do tours in places where we can’t support women. Without female guides, there would be no tours.

Community Building

SBS – What strategies have you used to build and engage your community of over 300,000 women?

Meg – We are fortunate to have a very engaged community, and despite the community growing, Mar and I have maintained our personal connection with the group the whole time. We still spend time every day of the year approving posts in the group, communicating and interacting with our members, and leaving links to resources that answer their questions. 

We have a very strict set of rules within the Facebook group and a very attentive moderation style, which allows us to maintain the group’s quality. It continues to be a place rich with questions, content, and discussion, and we actively ensure that it is an encouraging, uplifting, and positive space free of spam, promotion, bitterness, judgment, sarcasm, and off-topic conversation.

We’re very fortunate that one of our largest sources of growth is word of mouth — we commonly see in the member requests to join the group that they heard about us through their sister, their mother, their hairdresser, or another woman whom they sat next to on a plane. 

We will continue to invest the hours we spend on maintaining the quality of our group, as word of mouth is one of our most valuable and passive forms of growth. 

Content Strategy

SBS – How do you develop your content strategy, particularly for your expert solo travel courses and safety advice?

Meg – Our Facebook group is a fabulous place for understanding what women want and what the most frequently asked questions among Solo Female Travelers are, so we develop content for our website based on the questions commonly asked in the group. 

We combine this with SEO research to confirm that there is also interest in the topics we write about from the wider internet community. 

Sustainable Business Practices

SBS – How do you ensure that your business practices support local female-owned and led businesses?

Meg – As mentioned above, if we are not able to support female-led businesses in a destination, we will not run a tour. 

We work directly with the local female-owned businesses, so the cost of your trip goes to the people who make it extraordinary. We don’t work with international middlemen, we want to support and amplify the work of local women.

Our trips are always led by a local and female guide. No foreigners flying in to tell you about a country they weren’t born in. We always embrace immersive travel; it’s not a matter of tourist vs. traveler. It’s the difference between getting to know a place and seeing it as an outsider. We embrace local traditions and get to know the destination inside out through the eyes of our local guides and the women we meet.

We don’t exploit local women for gain. We don’t practice poverty tourism, we don’t use local women as props, we do the right thing, even if it means doing things differently to every other tour operator. 

Take our local women-only tour of Egypt as an example. Almost everyone working in the tourism industry in Egypt relies on commissions from your purchases to earn a living, sometimes exclusively. This means they will take you to a well-oiled machine of establishments disguised under the appearance of workshops that will pressure you into buying perfume, papyrus, paintings, alabaster items, Egyptian cotton, etc. We got into the travel industry to make it more equitable for women and believe in responsible tourism, so we do things differently. We pay those who will make our trip unforgettable above market rates, and you won’t be taken shopping AT ALL on our trip. We also include tips for the dozens of porters, drivers, boat drivers, airport greeting staff, etc., in the price. 

Content Diversity

SBS – How do you keep your content diverse and inclusive for travelers of different backgrounds?

Meg – Our Facebook group is a fantastic source of opinions, ideas, attitudes,, and perspectives from all over the world. We have women from 190+ countries, and we are a proudly multicultural group that strongly believes in inclusion. 

Because we welcome all members, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and political perspectives, we are a truly diverse group of women, and the discussions in our group have unique, modern, and fresh ideas that inform our content and make it the most diverse and inclusive resource on the internet. 

Our content is not re-written from lists on the internet, it is informed by real life experience from real life women, and regularly updated so that the content is both diverse and inclusive for travelers who are traveling right now, in the modern context.

Empowerment through Information

SBS – How do you ensure that your tips, tricks, and advice empower women to travel confidently and independently?

Meg – By ensuring that the tips, tricks, and advice are genuinely helpful. 

We don’t write short lists or short pieces for our website, when we create a resource, we do so wanting it to genuinely be the most helpful thing on the internet, which answers every single one of your questions. We will often publish 10,000-word pieces, which weave in not only our personal experience but also the tips, tricks, and advice of the 300,000 women of our community. 

We believe that knowledge is power and that preparation is the best way to feel ready and comfortable taking the first or the next solo trip. So, we create resources that are free of sponsorship and allow us to write in the most genuine, honest way. 

Tour Experiences

SBS – What are the key elements that make your curated journeys unique and life-changing?

Meg – This is what makes us unique:

• For Likeminded Women: Meet women like you who share a love for travel and female empowerment. Come solo, make memories, and leave as friends
• Local Female Led: No female guide, no tour. Our trips are always led by a local and female guide. No foreigners flying in to tell you about a country they weren’t born in
• For Solo Travelers: For independent women. We design our trips with the solo female traveler in mind. We’ll pair you to avoid single supplements or pay extra and have a room to yourself
• Photographer Onboard: No need for selfie sticks or posed photo shoots. We understand the challenges of getting great photos when you travel solo, so a photographer will join us on some trips
• Trips you can’t replicate: We curate activities you cannot book on your own. We build personal relationships with locals businesses and individuals, so we have access to places not open to the general public
• Transparent: We share all the details. You always know where we stay, what we do, and where we will be at all times. We don’t believe in abstract itineraries or in hiding our secrets. You can replicate our itinerary on your own if you prefer
• Immersive Travel: It’s not a matter of tourist vs traveler it’s the difference between getting to know a place and seeing it as an outsider. We embrace local traditions and get to know the destination inside out through the eyes of our local guides and the women we meet
• For Foodies and Wine Lovers: We love our food and think a destinations’ gastronomy tells you a lot about a place. Our trips include several gastronomic activities, winery/distillery visits, and meals with a view
• Intimate: No buses, umbrellas, or headsets. We only operate small group tours with no more than 14 guests. Our tours are cozy. You all start as strangers and leave as friends for life
• Local Impact: We work directly with local female-owned businesses, so the cost of your trip goes to the people who make it extraordinary. We don’t work with international middlemen. We want to support and amplify the work of local women

Engaging with Your Audience

SBS – How do you actively engage with your online community to understand their evolving travel needs and interests?

Meg – We are managing our Facebook Group full-time, daily. We are in the group personally engaging with our community, personally answering questions every day of the year except for Christmas when we take a 24-hour online detox/break!

Tips for Aspiring Travel Bloggers

SBS – What tips would you offer to aspiring travel bloggers or entrepreneurs looking to enter the travel industry?

Meg – Find a niche you’re passionate about. When you have a passion for something, you tend to not only be better at it, but you work harder at it, too.

Future Goals and Aspirations

SBS – What are your future goals for Solo Female Travelers, and how do you plan to expand or evolve the platform?

Meg – Our goal is to continue amplifying our impact on empowering women, challenging gender stereotypes within the travel and tourism industry, and making the industry more equitable, with more opportunities for women. This will mean continuing to expand our tour offerings to more destinations, working with more local female partners, and expanding the family of guests who travel on tours with us.