This International Women’s Day travel meta search provider WayAway is highlighting the need for better travel planning tools that allow women to feel comfortable when travelling alone.

Responding to this year’s 8th March theme from UN Women of “DigitALL: innovation and technology for gender equality”, WayAway is calling on the travel technology industry to use its considerable innovation skills and resources to solve this worrying problem.

Sadly despite the fact that Google searches for ‘solo female travel’ have quadrupled over the last ten years a recent survey on the WayAway website showed that four times as many women as men felt that ‘travelling alone is unsafe’.

Meanwhile, academic research shows that too many of those females who do travel alone do so by “internalizing the normality of unsafety” and that their fears have “overall negative effects on travel intentions”.

Janis Dzenis, Head of PR & Communications at WayAway comments: “We find it shocking that over 100 years since the first International Women’s Day so many females still don’t feel as comfortable as men when it comes to travelling alone.

“When it comes to travel it would seem that almost every possible tool has been invented for every possible niche, but somehow for female solo travellers the technology on offer is, with few exceptions, pretty substandard and most importantly far from universally available. For example, how many websites have filters that might cater for such needs? Or how many allow you to see female only commentaries and ratings?

“For those travel technology companies that can really make an impact in this area there is a huge financial reward on offer too: female travellers will naturally gravitate towards, perhaps even swamp, travel platforms that can offer them the reassurances they understandably crave.”