2025: The Good, Bad & Ugly + DNA samples to enter the US + Embarrassing stories

Hi Reader,

It's only over a week to the end of 2025 but I have already been thinking about the year's recap for a while.

Meg and I reviewed the year with the rest of the team almost a month ago and it was both humbling and incredible to look back at the year's achievement and the last 5 years since we offered our first group tour.

I feel deeply grateful and happy to have built something as resilient and soulful.

📩 On this week's email

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of 2025. The highest and lowest moments and the ones that have brought us most joy.
The Trump Administration is planning to ask visitors from visa-exempt countries (most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc.) for their social media posts of the last 5 years to be made public, for any email addresses used in the last decade, as well as for face, fingerprint, DNA and iris biometrics. It would also ask for the names, addresses, birthdates and birthplaces of family members, including children.
We are getting ready to start recording the first episodes of our podcast and one section in it will share embarrassing stories from our and your travels. Got an embarrassing story to share? Submit it here and we will read it during the podcast. PS It can remain anonymous, don't be shy!

2025 in review: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Group shots from some of the tours we ran in 2025

2025 has marked the 6th anniversary of Meg and I managing the Facebook community and the 5th year of Solo Female Travelers Tours.

These last 5 years have flown by at the speed of lightning and I can't believe that it's already been this long since our very first tour to Iceland.

In these years, we have learned and grown dramatically, and it is both humbling and incredible to look back and see how far we have come and the amazing team we have brought together.

Here is 2025 in numbers:

We traveled to 18 destinations, 4 of which were new in 2025: Iceland, Barcelona, Amalfi Coast, Tuscany, Greece, Georgia (new), Sweden (new), Tanzania, Morocco, Egypt, Madagascar (new), Oaxaca, Cuba, Australia, Bali (new), Xmas markets, Scotland, Croatia & Montenegro.
41 tours with an average of 12 guests per tour with June, September and October being the busiest months for us
500 women from 23 countries have traveled with us this year.
37% of the travelers had been on tours with us before and were on their 2nd, 3rd, 4th or even 5th trip with us!
We launched 6 new destinations for 2026 and beyond: Japan, Galapagos, Ecuador & Galapagos, Luxury Caribbean island hopinn, Armenia and Antarctica.
Our team grew with the addition of Stella as a Logistics Manager.

👏👏 The Good

When I look back at 2025, I feel incredibly grateful and fortunate to be where I am as a person and as a business.

This is the result of consistently believing in what we do and staying true to our WHY: the values and the motivation that brought us here in the first place and that continues to attract likeminded women to our world.

The best part of 2025 remains the people we have met.

1.Our team is THE BEST

Most companies and bosses will tell you that their team is everything and that they wouldn't be where they are without the support of their teams. While this is probably true for most, it is especially so for us.

Our guides and local hosts, and every woman who is part of the experiences we offer, is someone who brings their complete self to us and shares a slice of their lives with our guests.

They are passionate about their country, but they are also fiercely feminist and pro-equality.

Our in-house team is extraordinarily passionate about our mission. They share all our enthusiasm for making a difference, and you can tell.

I was interviewed for a podcast last week and they asked me how we train the team on values and culture given that we are a fully distributed company with each team member working remotely from 4 continents.

We have never all been physically in the same place, though we plan to in the Caribbean onboard our luxury island-hopping trip.

Even setting up a video call with the entire team means Anastasia joining in at 6am from California and Meg at 12am midnight from Australia, because we spans 18 time zones.

COVID taught us how hard it is to keep the culture alive and everyone on the same page and connected when we are far apart.

Solo Female Travelers has always been a remotely distributed company and yet, we are extremely well connected and aligned on everything we do.

How do we achieve that?

Because we all feel the same about the work we do; We all share the same passion for making the travel industry more equitable for women, for bringing likeminded guests together and for curating trips of a lifetime that stay with you for years to come. Salaries are important, but doing meaningful work that makes a difference keeps people in the longer term.

We don't have to train them on our values because we don't need to, the company values are their personal values too.

So, when I say we have the best team in the world, I mean it. Solo Female Travelers is a team effort and 2025 continued to prove it.

Thank you Stella, Anastasia, Gaby and Jacobo for making Solo Female Travelers the amazing project it is. And thank you to Kim, Bea, and Emily, the photographers who accompanied some of our tours this year and captured the beauty of happiness.

2.The vision

Our host Lily and female chef Adhey in Oaxaca

2025 reminded us once again of the power of surrounding yourself with people who share your vision and who believe in you.

We put our heart and soul into curating itineraries that are magical, but at the core of what we do is supporting women in tourism.

So many of our guests mention this as a salient point for traveling with us and that is just magic.

We never started Solo Female Travelers to become rich, but to shake things up and bring opportunities to women.

We have built a community of travelers who want to make their vacation count, and this is a dream come true for us.

We received over 150 new 5* reviews in 2015 (from just 500 guests) and countless suggestions to perfect our itineraries. So many women took the time out of their busy lives to leave a review on our Google profile or send us an email.

Since you can only review a company once on Google, many repeat guests reached out by email to share their feedback and suggestions.

Anyone who owns a business knows how hard it is to get any kind of feedback or reviews. Having 30% of your customers leave a review is INCREDIBLE.

Meg and I cannot even begin to express how humbling this is.

We are the luckiest people in the world to have such a fantastic team and so many supporting and customers who want to see us succeed.

This is some of the most precious feedback we received this year:

About our Madagascar trip: "Everyday filled me with amazement. It was never ending 'pinch me i'm dreaming' moments. They days were long and busy but never exhaustingly so. The vibes Mar oozes are infectious and second to none.
Everything that was a possibility we'd might see....we saw! Perfection.
This all probably sounds way too gushing for a review but I cannot state how much I loved this, how happy I feel and how lucky I am to have found this company. But they all made my dream come true and for that I am truly grateful."

About Oaxaca: "I am a seasoned solo female traveler, and with over 60 countries travelled, and the Oaxaca trip with Solo Female Travelers is only my 3rd organised, multi-day group tour. The whole week was so mindfully curated, with the emphasis on meeting the women behind each story, and being given the opportunity to support them in our own little way."

About Australia and Iceland: "As a plus-size, neurodivergent woman of color, I often worry about how I’ll be perceived when traveling. With Solo Female Travelers, I felt completely accepted, even celebrated at times, for who I am."

About Georgia: "My favorite part of this company is its focus on women owned business and empowering women around the world, and that to me will always put them in the lead in women’s travel."

About Bali: "Solo Female Travelers (SFT) does a wonderful job from start to finish with explaining what to expect on the trip and being communicative of any updates or changes. They truly put women first in their travel planning and such a pleasure to work with. I communicated with Meg before the trip and she’s always very kind and takes her time to explain things throughly."

About the friendships made on tours: "My trip to Greece is my second trip with them and I just signed up for a third! Next summer I’ll meet up with friends from both Spain and Greece and I can’t believe my good luck."

About Croatia & Montenegro: "This trip exceeded all my expectations. I’m already feeling anxious—in the best way—eagerly awaiting the opportunity to book my next journey with Solo Female Travelers."

About Sweden: "this trip and it's itinerary is what dreams are made of. So much love, care, attention to detail went into planning this trip and I am so honored that I was able to be a part of it. I 1,000% would do this again!!!"

About Cuba: "Not only did we immerse our selves in the culture, but we also got to meet so many amazing, like minded women who became friends. For me thats what this experience should be all about. Already making plans not only to go and visit with some of the friends I made on this trip, but working on booking my second trip with this company hopefully for this year."

SEE OUR CALENDAR OF TOURS

👎👎 The Bad

At home, enjoying the beaches of Costa Brava

In 2025 I learned what being burn out is really like. And it wasn't fun.

In my 22 year professional career, I have heard and seen other people being burnt out before but had never experienced it myself, despite 8 years as a management consultant which tested my patience, my resilience and my stress tolerance.

Frequent traveling isn't new to me at all. I have been traveling almost every week and have spent half of the year on the road for 20+ years.

I am used to being more time away from home than at home.

For 8 years, I took a flight every Sunday / Monday morning and returned home on Wednesday or Thursdays about half of the times, traveling elsewhere for the other half.

I have been tracking my travels since 2014 and I know I have spent over 150 nights and more than 200 days away every year since.

I don't get homesick, lonely or bored when I travel and flying or being in a different country doesn't stress me. I can survive 24-30h travel days. I can go on with minimal sleep after a overnight flight. I always loom both sides of the road before crossing, because I don't take for granted we drive on the right or on the left. I can work anywhere and block out any kind of noise. I am flexible and can adapt to any environment. Little fazes me these days and it takes a lot for me to be overwhelmed.

But 2025 taught me what bring burnt out really is like.

I already started the year exhausted from 2024, and then had to embark a 7-week trip through 7 countries + Antarctica. This was a trip of a lifetime on a luxury Caribbean ship, to the Amazon, the Galapagos islands and then the ultimate continent.

But I was so tired that in the small 15min breaks we had between landings / excursions and meals onboard the ship in Antarctica, I dashed to my cabin to have 10-min naps. I was mentally and physically spent.

And I still had 4 more months of traveling, new tours with guests to host, and scouting of new destinations after that. Plus all the ongoing fire-putting challenges of running a small, global business.

I was in the most incredible place in the world, the destination many people dream of for decades and safe for their entire lives, and all I wanted to do was sleep.

I participated in all the activities, of course, went kayaking among penguins, icebergs and whales and hiked up hills in the cold, snow and wind. But all I could think of is going back home and getting into bed.

The irony did not escape me. But I was too tired and grumpy to care.

The problem with burnout is that by the time you realise you're simply done with everything, you can't just take a break straightaway. Most people can't just drop it all and take time off.

If you are a business owner, this is even harder because you have a business to run, customers to serve and a team to manage. You can't just disappear overnight because you need a break.

I knew I needed to stop, but I couldn't let everyone down and change my travel plans for the coming 4 months, I had to push through to the summer, and then take a break.

I cancelled all the projects we had in the summer and was extremely grateful that Meg took the load so I could take a step back.

I barely traveled anywhere from mid June to the beginning of September except for a short solo trip to Menorca and another short trip to celebrate my birthday in Porto.

I spent 3 months eating well, exercising, spending time outside, going to the beach, hiking, spending time with friends, and sleeping as much as I could.

I worked minimal hours to keep everything afloat and support my team. I have the best business partner and friend in the world who held the fort while I was resting and recuperating, and an incredible team who took care of everything.

I didn't know how long I would need or if I would return with the same passion. I was quite done with everything.

But thankfully, my love for Solo Female Travelers, traveling and making a difference were all still there by the end of summer and I can say that I am back stronger than ever and with one lesson: No is a full sentence, and it is better to slow down than to hit rock bottom.

2026 and beyond will be more mindful. We are taking it as a year to build the foundation for the next 5 years of Solo Female Travelers.

It's very hard to say no to attractive opportunities when they arise, but we won't be able to make any difference if I cannot be there fully.

Here's to a more balanced growth going forward! 🥂

💣💣 The Ugly

Despite the overwhelmingly amazing year we had, there were also some ugly moments.

1.Rudeness and disrespect

Once again, the hardest part of our job for both me and Meg is being on the receiving end of rudeness and disrespect.

Anyone with a customer-facing role has received feedback from an unhappy customer or partner.

We encourage comments and feedback which means that many guests will give us suggestions. We have always considered feedback a gift, and we in fact love it when guests propose changes or share their opinion about anything.

Feedback isn't the ugly side of 2025, or any previous year for that matter.

Ugly is the uncalled rudeness, especially for things beyond our control.

Unreasonable or mismatched expectations despite clear communication and ungratefulness when we have gone above and beyond our responsibilities are hard to swallow. We aren't a faceless corporation, we are people, and we do things with love and our full heart.

It is discouraging to do everything in our power to help someone with something outside our scope and then receive disrespectful messages.

There is a person at the end of that crude email, and that person is typically Meg. She reads all our emails and responds to everyone. I wish we we are all a bit kinder and more mindful of the way with communicate with others.

Besides rudeness towards us, my all time dislike is rudeness and disrespect towards our Hosts and Guides.

Meg and I draw the line at this and will not allow guests who have been mean and rude to our teams to join us on tour again. This is a limit that we won't tolerate being crossed.

We set out to offer tours to support women in tourism, so bringing guests who not only do not share our mission but are also mean to our team is unacceptable.

Thankfully this is exceedingly rare.

2.Meta going awry

In 2025 we also felt the changes in social media and Meta negatively affecting our business and lives when Meg's personal Facebook account was suspended for good when she shared our annual survey on Solo Female Travel Trends on Facebook.

Her account vanished straightaway.

We have grown to increasingly dislike Meta's decisions and its move away from its original mission of connecting people and this was just the cherry on the cake.

Managing the community feels like a guessing game of "what has Facebook done today to make our lives more difficult?"

Facebook has been evolving in all sorts of wrong ways in the recent years and we know we need to protect our community in case the group also disappears overnight.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we have been working on a Podcast for the last couple of months in view of having it live in the spring. I am very excited to connect with all of you and other solo female travelers in a more intimate way soon.

PS: Our podcast will have a section with embarrassing travel stories. Got one to share? Submit it here (anonymously if you want) and we will read it during the podcast.

The US may require advance data to allow entry

The Trump administration has put out a new proposal that would mean travelers from the 42 currently visa-exempt countries such as the majority of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan would have to fulfil a host of new requirements to be allowed entry into the US including:

Make public all social media posts of the last 5 years.
Any telephone numbers used by visitors over the last 5 years.
Any email addresses used in the last decade.
Face, fingerprint, DNA and iris biometrics.
The names, addresses, birthdates and birthplaces of family members, including children.

This new proposal is out for review and commentary by the public until February here.

More details on this plan and other changes to immigration and entry procedures into the US can be found here.

Photo of the week

Last week's photo

This photo was taken in in Oslo when I visited a couple of years ago in September. What a great city!

Congrats Mariana and Luisa for guessing the right location!

This week's photo

Can you guess this week's photo? Hint: It is not London.