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NomadHer built a verified community for women traveling alone – tapping a market where 76% of Gen Z travelers already prefer to go solo.
ENTRY ANGLES
Event-based travel packages (sports, concerts, cultural events) · Last-minute/impulse travel booking solutions · Solo travel experiences and communities
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Travel logistics and package curation, Community building and creator partnerships, Real-time booking and inventory management
NomadHer is an online community for women who prefer to travel solo.
New members go through document-based identity verification to confirm they are women – keeping out anyone who might exploit knowledge of a woman traveling alone and far from home.
Inside the community, members share travel stories and post information about women-friendly hotels, transport providers, bars, clubs, restaurants, and other places they've visited.
If a member connects with someone's story, she can reach out directly and continue the conversation in a private chat.
From there, members can find travel companions for upcoming trips or arrange meetups with community members whose itineraries happen to overlap.
NomadHer also organizes its own in-person meetups and travel gatherings around the world, giving community members a chance to meet face to face.
The community has more than 200,000 members from 180 countries, and has already organized over 1,000 in-person events.
NomadHer just raised $748K, bringing its total investment and grant funding to $2.02M.
Finding yourself alone in an unfamiliar country can genuinely be stressful – and at times risky. Solo female travel might sound like a niche too small to build a startup around. But looking at the actual numbers tells a different story.
For starters, women make up 64% of all travelers – men account for only 36%
And even in shared travel, women aren't just a voice – they're the deciding voice. 80% of all travel decisions are made by women, whether directly or by steering their partners toward the right choice. Women also typically control the travel budget, spending $125 billion on travel annually.
Additionally, around 30% of all travelers go solo. And 85% of solo travelers are women.
These aren't necessarily young women with more time than money finally escaping their parents. The average American solo traveler is a 47-year-old woman.
Interestingly, at least 60% of solo female travelers are married – they just travel on their own.
Why? 42% say their husbands simply don't enjoy traveling, while 40% say their travel interests don't align with their partner's.
Counter to the "homemaker" stereotype, women are actually more inclined to leave home and explore, while men tend to prefer staying in familiar surroundings with their computer, their dog, and their slippers.
Some women even argue that solo travel is a healthy way to preserve a marriage – brief separation keeps things fresh. Beyond that:
- 26% of solo female travelers say it's one of the easiest ways to make new connections, - 22% say it's a natural way to enjoy independence, - 15% say they can go exactly where they want, - and 6% say they don't have to coordinate schedules with anyone.
So solo female travelers are an exceptional audience – both highly influential in shared travel decisions and the single largest group of solo travelers.
The travel market has fully recovered from the pandemic and kept growing beyond pre-pandemic levels. By 2027, it will cross $1 trillion.
That means there's real space to enter or re-enter travel with new products. The key is building on the trends that are actually shaping demand right now.
From the American Express 2024 Travel Report:
75% of travelers want to attend sports events during their trips, and 67% of Gen Z and millennials would plan entire trips around them.
Startup BookSeats ([related review](/review/rost-v-kvadrate-chuzhimi-rukami)), which raised $1.1M, does exactly that – selling travel packages built around sports matches, concerts, and other events in other cities and countries.
65% more people want "immersive" travel experiences that deliver something genuinely new. Essentialist ([related review](/review/millionery-popali-v-dyru)) serves this segment – a high-end, personalized travel planning service available only to members who pay $2,600 per year. It has raised $11.9M. TrovaTrip ([related review](/review/vlijatelnye-puteshestvenniki)) takes a different angle: themed group trips led by creator-guides – bloggers who double as tour leaders – and raised $20M.
76% of Gen Z and millennial travelers are planning solo trips in 2024 – exactly the trend NomadHer is riding.
77% of Gen Z and millennials are prone to impulse travel – booking last-minute based on a mood, something they saw, or a sudden urge to go somewhere.
Destination choice is increasingly driven by visual appeal: nearly half of travelers pick places based on how good the photos and videos will look on their social feeds. And 75% of people rely on social media content when deciding where to go. Which is why travel booking marketplaces built around short-video feeds – infinite scroll of destinations rather than list views – are starting to appear. Travly ([related review](/review/ljudi-stali-vybirat-glazami)) built one such marketplace and is migrating its large social travel following into the app; similar apps have followed.
A perhaps surprising finding from McKinsey: the majority of the travel market – measured both in trip-days and in spending – is domestic or regional travel, not international. People travel closer to home far more than the industry spotlight suggests. Marketplaces serving local and regional tourism have raised meaningful rounds in several markets, signaling real demand beyond the international-travel headline.
Bottom line: the size and trajectory of the travel market make it absolutely worth entering right now. And the density of fresh trends provides more than enough starting points and inspiration for products that can rise sharply on the next wave.