Welcome to the first episode of the Solo Female Travelers Podcast!
In this episode, co-founders Meg Jerrard and Mar Pagès share the stories that shaped their relationship with travel and ultimately led them to create Solo Female Travelers. They are also joined by Operations Manager Anastasia Novosyolova-Blatt, who supports the team in tour operations, creative work, photography, and in the production of this podcast.
From first solo trips, 20 years in the navy and international careers to motherhood and reinvention, this episode introduces the women behind SFT and the experiences that shaped the company’s mission and direction.
If you have ever wondered who is behind Solo Female Travelers, what this podcast is about, or why solo female travel can be so transformative, this is the perfect episode to begin with.
Transcript
Mar | 00:00
Welcome to the first episode of the Solo Female Travelers Podcast. We are Mar Pagès and Meg Jerrard, and this is a space for honest conversations about travel. The kind that go beyond highlight reels and ask the questions that are in everybody’s minds.
Meg | 00:11
We’re here to share real stories, useful advice that will make your trip smoother and experiences from women who just did it. Our episodes will be a mix of interviews with bold adventurers, interesting travelers, or experts on topics around the solo female travel experience, our personal travel tips, and the latest news and travel developments. There will also be fun, embarrassing travel stories at the end of every episode to end on a high note. You’ll feel inspired, maybe feel identified and likely entertained by our conversations, and we hope that you’ll look forward to each episode with a childlike anticipation.
Mar | 00:44
But before we get started, we want to introduce our team so that you can put a name behind the voices that will come right into your podcast list every week. The Solo Female Travelers Podcast will be hosted by Meg and I and produced by Anastasia, who will host some of the episodes where her experience is greater than ours. Being from Spain and Australia, we often get asked how we met. So I will start there. Meg and I met at a conference in the Philippines in 2015. And we stayed online friends and worked on a project for one of Google’s startups in 2018. It was through this project that we realized that we shared similar values and work ethic, as well as a love for travel. And so I heard about an opportunity to take over the solo female travelers online community from a friend, and I immediately thought about doing it with her. The pandemic kept us apart since we were both in countries with strict lockdowns. So we had to start Solo Female Travelers Tours in 2021 remotely without seeing each other in person until June of 2023. That’s more than two years, which Anastasia captured on camera at the welcome dinner of the Barcelona tour. With this origin story in mind, I will let Meg tell you more about herself.
Meg | 01:45
Hi, so my name’s Meg Jerrard. I’m a 37-year-old single mother. I’m a full-time parent to a would-be Spiderman, and I’m based in Cairns, Australia. And so I’ve been traveling solo since I was about 18 years old. That makes me feel quite old now. My role within Solo Female travelers as a co-founder, I work from home. I support our admin side of things. So for instance, it’s usually me who replies to your email inquiries, who sets you up with your packing lists, your travel tips before you go on tour, assist you with your reservation and all of the other kind of behind-the-scenes parts of a business which happen at the computer in the background and keep things running smoothly. So I grew up in small-town Tasmania or Tassie. So that’s the little island at the bottom of Australia which most people do leave off maps. And my family moved to Canberra when I was 12 years old, which many on mainland Australia might argue would be my first international trip.
I still remember my mother’s frustration because she’d make calls before our first move to set us up with new schools and new dentists and all of that type of thing. And the people on the other end would end the call with welcome to Australia or safe travels to Australia. And I just still vividly remember she’d have this reply through gritted teeth. She’s like, we live in Australia. So my first international trip was at, it was at age 14 and that was to Japan. That wasn’t solo, but it was with my year nine Japanese class at school. And I would love to tell you that there was some life-changing moment of like clarity on this trip, but I wasn’t technically solo. I did leave the country without my parents, but honestly, as a squealy 14-year-old girl, we’re all very squealy at that age. We were most excited about Tokyo Disney. So I did then travel solo at age 18. And while solo travel then became something that I very confidently owned.
In spite of quite a lot of outside judgment at times. I very almost didn’t take that trip and I was really pushed by my father to make it happen. I don’t think I’ve actually ever told this story before. So dad, if you’re listening, this is kind of a nod to you. I don’t think I have. So it’s a bit of a shout out to dad if he’s listening and I will send him this episode. But yeah, looking back now, I can actually really appreciate how fortunate I am to have such an incredibly supportive family behind me.
I had applied to boarding school in the UK for a gap year placement. And this is a really popular thing to do among graduating Australian high school students. So I applied for a position as a live-in teacher’s aide. Got rejected. And then I kind of threw the towel in. I kind of went like, whatever, I just won’t do it. And I think a lot of people can probably identify with that. But then dad sat me down and essentially told me if it was something I wanted to do, cut out the whole woe is me routine.
Meg | 04:26
When I said woe is me to Mar before, she didn’t actually understand what that meant. For anybody listening, woe is me is like, cut your pity party.
Mar | 04:33
I’m sure that non-English speakers will have the same question mark in their faces that I had. I was like, what?
Meg | 04:38
We have a debate going because I think that’s a really common English saying and Mar’s telling me it’s not. I was about to say, please comment in the comments, but that’s not really something you do on a podcast, right? You don’t leave comments. Email us and tell us if you know what woe is me means. But yeah, so essentially dad sat me down and told me to cut the pity party. And if this is something I actually wanted to do.
Anastasia | 04:42
It is pretty common. Yeah.
Mar | 04:45
I’ve never heard it before.
Meg | 05:03
Go apply to every single school in the UK because applying to one school doesn’t really count as trying. So the next day I found an online registry of 300 something schools in the UK. I probably invented the first form of internet spam because I literally just sent out applications to every single one. Dad called me two months later and I remember it because I was in the movie cinema with my friends and I remember it vividly. She’s the Man was playing, which I feel like is quite fitting for this situation. And he was on the phone and told me get home right now because the principal of a school in the UK is on the phone offering me a placement. So having spent the last kind of 10 years listening to stories of other women in our Facebook community, I’ve since realized just how many women actually struggle with family approval for getting started in solo travel and how their relationships and how their family can offer the most form of judgment. So kind of reflecting back on this now, I can actually really appreciate, how fortunate I am to have been in the position where my family were actually the push and not the challenge.
So after I got back from the UK, I spent a year working, backpacking around Europe in the school holidays. You can cue all of the cliches here about being bitten by the travel bug and being truly addicted. I returned to Australia. I was really determined that I was going to see as much of the world as possible. So I traveled every semester break of my five-year university degree. I often left pretty much straight as an exam finished. And then I arrived back a week after classes started. I did a double degree in journalism and law and I did study abroad programs through the Netherlands, the Czech Republic. I packed in volunteer trips, like Scouts Australia. And when I was 22, I climbed Kilimanjaro solo, which was definitely the transformative and life-changing experience that the Tokyo Disneyland at 14 was not. And yeah, it was on that trip to Kilimanjaro where I met another American solo traveler and that chance meeting ended up in a whirlwind long-distance relationship, which ended in a wedding in Hawaii, which included living in the USA, running a travel blog, which was our full-time career for 10 years. We wrote a book on long-distance relationships, then we moved to Australia and we now have a beautiful baby boy. Well, I say baby, but he’s four now, so he’s very much not a baby anymore.
We were married for 12 years. We’ve since gone in different directions. So now I am a 37-year-old single mother who continues to travel solo. And I continue to advocate that mothers, wives, doesn’t matter who you are, you shouldn’t erase yourself entirely into those roles. I’ve found that there’s a lot of judgment and questions that are thrown at you when you travel solo and you have family obligations. But I’m a very big advocate for not abandoning the parts of yourself that you love. So go fill your cup, miss your babies, come back rested, come back recharged so that you can be the best person you can be while you raise them. I genuinely believe that my son deserves to have me with my light intact. And for you, this is paraphrasing from an Instagram post that I saw, but for you, it could be running or putting your kids in daycare or going out dancing with your friends. But it comes down to you can’t fill your cup, sorry, you can’t fill someone else’s cup if your cup is empty.
So I think that is the short version of me. Over to you, Mar. Let’s tell our listeners a bit more about your travel life.
Mar | 08:09
And I will start with my name because almost everybody who knows me from our tours thinks that my surname is Pages. Sometimes people think that this is a pseudonym because, you know, Pages writing, whatever they think is like some sort of writer’s pseudonym. But actually my name is Mar, which means the sea. Maria del Mar, Mar. And Pagès, not Pages. It has an accent on the E, which I can never type because I don’t have a keyboard to type Catalan accents. And a Pagès in Catalan is a farmer.
Meg | 08:34
I was just going to jump in and say too, it is Mar, M-A-R because we do receive a lot of emails from people who say hi Mars, like the planet.
Anastasia | 08:42
I am learning a lot today. How did I not know half of the things that you both just spoke about already?
Meg | 08:48
There you go.
Mar | 08:49
And also, let me correct Meg, it’s not Mar, it’s Mar, with an R.
Meg | 08:53
Well, and I did, because we did kind of write down some notes for what we wanted to speak about on the first podcast and I’m reading and it says, hi, my name is Mar Pagès not Pages. And I’m like, what? But then I’m like, then I listened, then I read it in Mar’s voice and I went, Mar Pagès , not Pages. And I’m like, okay, I get it now.
Mar | 09:09
So if you’ve traveled with us before, we may have met and you probably have heard my story before, though I tell it differently every single time because I don’t really have a way of telling it. So depending on the day, you may get a different version. This is today’s version. I had a very typical childhood with trips to Andorra and the Pyrenees as the only travel and the travel bug as Meg says only bit me when I was 21. And I decided that I wanted to spend the summer in London learning English.
Why? I have no idea. I don’t remember. I should probably ask my mother because she for sure remembers what reason I gave her for wanting to do that. In my mind, I would find a job at the coffee shop and just earn enough to sustain myself for the entire summer while improving my English. Of course, I was not the only one that had this thought. And this was more than 20 years ago, 25 years ago, right? Actually now. And it was not just me having that same thought. Pretty much everybody that is from Southern Europe had the exact same idea. And everybody wanted to go to London in the summer and work at some…some Pret a Manger or some Costa Coffee and earn money and just work. But my English was just not good enough to do that. And of course I didn’t get any job. So following that summer though, I went back to London the following summer to do an internship in investment banking. And it was because of that first summer when I learned English that I managed to get the second summer back in London working in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. If it hadn’t been because I learned English, because I did end up spending the whole summer in London just not working, but rather just exploring the city and learning English. I would have never gotten that job in investment banking that kickstarted my international career and my love for travel and my love for having jobs that require to travel. Now, following that summer internship, I volunteered a summer in Honduras at an NGO. Spent the whole summer there living in the poorest colonias in Tegucigalpa in Honduras that has forever stayed with me. Ever since then, I’ve always sponsored children since 2002 now, and I haven’t been back, but I would love to go back to the project. And I vowed to continue helping and make something of myself that would make a difference. But I was just not cut out to devote my whole life to teaching or to working in an NGO like many of the other people that were volunteering that summer at NGO. So I decided to find a well-paid job so that I could earn enough money to make a difference with that money, because I figured that my skills were better set to go into business, study business and make money so that I could invest in whatever project.
So I think that that’s probably the seed for Solo Female Travelers. It was planted in 2002 in Honduras. My first job out of university was at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a very typical corporate job. I graduated at the time of the dot-com bubble, so it was not a particularly good time to find a job and there were not a lot of opportunities to go around even though I was top of my class. And so my language skills helped me get an international job shortly after. So just a couple of years after university graduation, I managed to get a job that already required me to travel every single week in the EMEA region. So Europe, Middle East and Africa and so my projects and international career started every week. I would take a plane somewhere and come back on Friday. I was surrounded by international teams from all over the EMEA region. I had colleagues from Bosnia and South Africa and Benin and France and Germany. And the job itself was fine. What I really loved about it was actually traveling every single week and my colleagues who were very international, very global, very interesting. We always did cool things. We always stayed the weekend.
And then shortly after, a headhunter offered me a position to move to Dubai and work in consulting in the telecoms industry. And that was what catapulted my expat career. So that’s more than 20 years that I’m an expat now. I lived in Dubai, in Singapore and South Africa, in Johannesburg. It was pretty maddening to be in Dubai when it all started back in 2006. And it was exhilarating and exciting. But also every single week I came back to different streets and you know, complete chaos. Like 10 more floors in the building in front of me. And, you know, it was quite an interesting time to be around. I continued to travel every single week for work in the Middle East and Africa. I kind of fell in love with Africa. So most of my projects were in Africa until I moved to Singapore and to Johannesburg to open the offices there and then ultimately stayed in Singapore for 13 years now. I keep track of my travels. So I know that I have been away for 50 to 60 % of the year for the last 22 years.
I have visited 140 countries, probably more than 70 of those solo. Sometimes I combine solo time with work or colleagues or friends flying over. I’ve flown more than 1,000 times with airlines in all continents and have stayed at thousands of hotels. I traveled with all sorts of people from colleagues to friends, loved ones, families, in small groups of strangers, and even with people that I just met, and I think that certain kinds of trips are better solo while others are better shared. And with time, I have also learned to enjoy sharing some of these experiences with my partner and showing him my favorite destinations or revisiting them through their eyes. I am in charge of creating our trips on itineraries. That means that I do most of the travel at Solo Female Travelers since Meg has a small child. And I get to meet a lot of our guests, which is the best part of my job. I learn a lot of things on every tour, not just from the destination, but also from the women that come and join us.
Anastasia and I take care of the social media channel, though she does all the creative work because I am terrible at it. And I write our newsletter, which has a hundred thousand readers. If you’re subscribed, you will have gotten to know me pretty well because I have been writing this letter for, as I said, six years and I also talk about very much my personal life and my personal thoughts. And if you have not, you can hop over to the website at solofemaletravelers.club, click on the above menu and then subscribe to the newsletter. All three of us have very different travel styles, backgrounds and experiences, which means that you will get to have a very diverse perspective on solo travel from us. Because my travels took off with work in strategy consulting and they also involve four and five star hotels and business class flights, I kind of got used to it. It’s very hard for me to stay in a hostel, but Meg did the backpacking that I didn’t do as a younger person and so she can talk about that.
Meg | 14:46
It’s a very good thing that Mar your role is curating the itineraries because Mar has impeccable taste. I do remember one of the common questions we get about our Tanzania tour is what’s the difference between the Luxe and the Value Tour. I’m like, well, if you speak to Mar or myself, this is different because I think that our Value Tour has luxury accommodation because it’s luxury to me, but Mar has impeccable taste. So the Luxe tour is like the front cover of Nat Geo travel and leisure magazine style looks.
Anastasia | 15:14
I can vouch for that.
Mar | 15:15
I wouldn’t say having a back of all taste, but I would say that I’m very picky. And when it comes to luxury accommodations, I notice all the small little things that most people oversee. Just because I stay at so many that immediately the moment I step into a hotel, can tell everything that’s wrong with it. And that could be improved. I think this is, you know, like professional hazard. I see the slightly scratched furniture, the rough towels, the less than sparkling clean common areas, the small touches that make this place stand out and the heart that separates the chain from a boutique independent hotel. I’ve always worked in very heavily male dominated environments from telecoms, strategy consulting, emerging markets. These are all worlds that are very male dominated and they’re not commonly chosen by professional women. So my feminism is rooted in the personal experience of discrimination and of being in environments where women are just less than. So all of Solo Female Travel is the accumulation of a career and corporate travel and the commitment to bringing more women to an industry that can be a great equalizer. Now that you know me and Meg, it’s time to get to know Anastasia better. She has been traveling solo for a long time and has a very different background to that of me and Meg. She will not only produce each episode, but she will also host some of the conversations where she has unique perspectives. Anastasia.
Anastasia | 16:24
Hello. Hi, I’m Anastasia and I’m the operations manager at Solo Female Travelers. I’m part of logistics planning and as Mar mentioned, some of the stuff behind the scenes. Some of you probably already met me because I’ve been on a few of the trips as a professional photographer, which is actually how I got started with SFT in the first place. Before all that, I just finished up a 20-year Navy career and after…20 years of very structured life and having three children, I hit a point where I was like, okay, I need some freedom. I need to refine myself a bit. I want adventure. I want to travel more. I want to travel to places that I actually want to go to and not the places that I’ve been told to go to. So I started my research in travel companies, both for work and just for fun. And I wanted to see if there’s any that had professional photographers on board.
And that’s how I came across Solo Female Travelers. They weren’t the only one, but honestly, when I saw their website and read about them, I was hooked pretty immediately. And not just because the trips looked amazing, but because of the mission and the way that Mar and Meg talk about how they travel and who they support along the way. So I remember reaching out, I reached out to a few and I was like, I’m never going to hear from them. This email is just going to go die in some corporate inbox. But they wrote back pretty quickly, probably Meg. I don’t know actually.
Meg | 17:45
Because I am attached to four different devices and I’ve been known to physically pull the car over to the side of the road to like respond if something needs an urgent response.
Anastasia | 17:56
I believe it. I believe it now. Didn’t then. So, but the next thing I knew, I was heading on my first two trips in 2023 to Barcelona and Tuscany. And I still speak about them every time I go on a new trip and people ask me, which trip is your favorite? Or how did you get started? I’m always like Barcelona, Barcelona this, Barcelona that. So anyway, the trips were incredible, believe it or not. And they were very fun and grounding. I was genuinely transformed for many reasons. Maybe I’ll talk about it in a different episode. And then I was ready. Yeah, it’s true. I talk about it all the time. I just don’t want to over speak it. But anyway, so I connected with lots of women and I was ready. I knew I wanted to somehow someday to work with and for Mar and Meg.
Mar | 18:28
We want to hear it.
Anastasia | 18:45
So I remember still Meg was trying to get an elevator or something. I’m talking at her like, hey, hey, can I somehow keep me in mind for the future, blah, blah. If anything ever happened where you needed someone, and here we are now. So very happy to be here. Anyway, so a little bit more about me before all this. I moved to the United States from Belarus when I was 15, and I joined the United States Navy when I was 17. Part of my life was very scheduled, very detailed and structured and it was planned for me. So when I was 19, I had a chance to take a bit of time for myself. I had some leave saved up, like PTO or whatever you all call it in civilian world. And I planned a three-week backpacking trip across Europe. Just by planned, I mean I loosely planned where I’m going to fly into or I’m going to fly out of. And then I went and read some books back then, you know, Barnes and Noble still existed and you could like not buy a book and just read it for a bit and make a plan. So I knew where I wanted to go, but I had no bookings, just plane tickets. I figured I’d just fill in the blanks and see how it goes, which is, you know, I was so young and easy going back then. I’m a little more like Mar now when I travel or I try to plan at least a few things.
Mar | 20:00
And you could sleep on the floor or in a hostel or in a bus or in a train or…
Anastasia | 20:03
Yeah, hostel, floor, tent, met someone, go somewhere else instead of having a rigid plan, you know. I did, I changed destinations last minute, you have to go here, so I said “sure”. I took night trains, I slept in train stations, drank wine with people I just met, and I was in Cinque Terre, I’ll never forget that. And I ate things that I probably couldn’t eat now, but I pretty much survived off eating gelato for…several weeks. It’s true. Like all in one. Yes. So of course not everything went smoothly, but you know, it was that’s when I learned to trust myself and kind of let go and you know, not knowing what was next gave me so much comfort later on and built my confidence. And I feel like a lot of, know, we always talk about it, how things that we learn on a trip.
Meg | 20:32
That’s the best part of Italy.
Mar | 20:32
I mean, carbohydrates, protein, fruit, everything. It’s a full meal.
Anastasia | 20:59
Oftentimes, you bring it into your life. So I recognize that feeling again, when I went on my first SFT trip. And that’s why I basically was shoving my way into working with Mar and Meg. Yes, and I’m so excited to be part of this podcast and help bring these conversations to the SFT community.
Meg | 21:12
Which we’re very glad that you did.
Mar | 21:21
Well, when we started Solo Female Travelers, we didn’t anticipate so many things. We did not expect that it would grow so fast and that there would be so many reasons why women would travel with us. We did not expect to meet Anastasia and all the other women in our lives. There are so many women who book one of our small luxury trips because they want to stop waiting for some day. And want to turn their wishlist into reality. They want to do it in style and comfort rather than on a budget, just like me. And they want to expand their mind as cliche as this sounds and see the world through different eyes. They choose to travel with us because they want to make their vacation mean something more than just a great time.
Meg | 21:54
And I think that’s especially true for guests who are joining a trip as a way to reset their life after a changing moment. So for instance, the loss of a loved one or beating cancer or children leaving the home, divorce or a career change. These are all really common reasons to travel and joining an organized small group tour just removes all of the unknowns and that need for travel planning. Brings you instant travel friends as well. So many people do take their first solo trip with us and then they continue traveling on their own or they do join us on more trips. I’d say maybe around 40 % of our travelers are repeat guests that we get to see in different destinations, which is fantastic. And there’s something really, really fabulous about saying goodbye to a guest at the end of a week-long trip in Bali and saying, see you in Japan. Or my personal favorite is seeing people connect on one tour and realizing that they have mutual connections from previous trips with us. So, or that they know Anastasia from this trip or that trip. And I do genuinely remember after quite a few trips where Anastasia had been the official photographer, we’d start receiving emails from guests saying, I want to be on this trip, but can Anastasia be our photographer? So it’s really fabulous. I know it sounds cliche saying that we have an SFT family, but we genuinely do feel that we have an SFT family because we’ve not only had the privilege of being able to meet a lot of our guests in person. And as company owners, that means a lot to us, but it’s also amazing seeing friendships, like genuine friendship form and people knowing people through each other through the SFT tours.
Mar | 23:22
Yeah, there was just a message on the WhatsApp group, on one of the WhatsApp groups recently of one guest posting saying like, hey, I just booked this trip to the previous group trip, WhatsApp group, where she knew the two other guests were already booked on that trip as well, including the photographer. So it would be like a little reunion in the future, right? And Solo Female Travelers has been a for-profit company with a social impact mission since the very beginning, but we could not have predicted the impact that the movement we started would have. It’s incredible to see the long-term friendships between our guests and between our guests and our local hosts and the inspirational encouragement that our trips have generated. We have had guests change careers after a trip and become, you know, aircrew, find the courage to file for divorce or radically change their lifestyle habits. We even had two guests be engaged to be married, which is something that we never anticipated at the beginning.
Meg | 24:09
And that’s actually one of my favorite stories because one of the most frequently asked questions is how do you pair people in shared rooms on a trip? And I always like to think that I’m a perfect best friend matchmaker or like to put you together with a friend you didn’t know existed yet. But we had two people get engaged. So that was one of my favorite stories. And yes, so.
Mar | 24:29
Now you can put it on your CV, matchmaker.
Meg | 24:31
There you go. Matchmaker. So we’ve created all of this remotely too, obviously with the help of an amazing team. And yes, while juggling traveling for half of the year, which is Mar, she travels for half the year and juggling solo parenting of yes, it would be Spider-Man. Although Hulk seems to be the latest trend. It changes every day. It’s hard to keep up. And along the way we’ve met so many amazing women who are changing their worlds and changing their communities and who are using travel for, as a force of good. So.we can’t wait to introduce you to all of these incredible, amazing, inspiring women on the podcast. This is not going to be just another travel podcast. This is the one that you’re going to want to talk about with all of your friends and check before you plan a trip. So we hope to accompany you on the long haul flights on your morning commute and to tell you at least about one tip that you didn’t know in each episode.
Anastasia | 25:18
You can find Solo Female Travelers podcasts wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow the show, share it with friends, and don’t forget to send us your most embarrassing travel stories. Head over to our website at www.solofemaletravelers.club to find all the podcast episodes and the list of luxury women-only tours we offer. That is www.solofemaletravelers.club. We hope this will be the beginning of something magical!