Travel metasearch website WayAway has produced a ranking of the top 30 safest cities for female solo travellers in order to empower women to travel alone with confidence. This follows a recent poll by WayAway on its Instagram account – which now has over 10,000 followers – that revealed that 24% of women have cancelled a trip because of safety concerns. Whilst a previous poll on the WayAway website showed that four times as many women as men thought solo travel was unsafe.

Starting with the list of cities included in WayAway’s ‘Cities in a nutshell’ series – a travel city guide covering over 200 cities around the world – the company then ranked them for female safety by taking into account three factors:

1. Independent rankings for safety from companies such as The Economist, CondeNast, TimeOut, and the Resonance Consultancy.
2. The latest safety reports from Numbeo Crime Index rate, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection and data from Travelsafe-abroad.
3. Interviews with locals who helped to write WayAway’s ‘Cities in a nutshell guides’.

Janis Dzenis, Head of PR & Communications at WayAway comments: “That any travellers should have to cancel plans for safety fears is worrying but it is very shocking to see that this happens mostly to women. We often see females asking on our social media and other customer communications channels for advice on safety when picking a destination, so hope that many women will find this list indispensable.

“Not only though is there a moral case for making female travellers feel safe, there’s an economic one too – destinations and travel providers who can give female travellers safety assurances will be able to increase their sales and loyalty from an audience that makes up…well half the world!”.

The final list, with the safest city ranked in first place, is as follows:

This news follows a recent call by WayAway – coinciding with the International Women’s Day theme of “DigitALL: innovation and technology for gender equality” – on the travel technology sector to produce more and better technology applications that give female travellers greater security and confidence when travelling for business or pleasure anywhere in the world.

It also follows the introduction by WayAway of maps that include ‘no go’ areas based on crime figures and user feedback.