Women Travel Abroad: How Community, Safety, and Confidence Shape Every Trip
The desire to travel is not what stops women from exploring. It’s everything else.
Not knowing where to start.
Wondering if it’s safe.
Not having someone to travel with.
That’s what drove Katherine Butler-Dines to start running women-only trips.
I had the pleasure of chatting with Katherine, who is now the owner of Women Travel Abroad, earlier this year when I started She Can Explore. She acquired the company in 2024 and said the purchase “felt less like a business acquisition and more like a handoff between two people who cared about the same things.”
She knew immediately that this wasn’t just a business that aligned with her interests, it was a built around the exact same belief:
“Women deserve to travel. The barriers are real but surmountable, and the right environment—safe, supportive, and full of like-minded women—changes everything.”
I think you’ll enjoy meeting Katherine. Here’s our conversation.
What’s the story of how you came to own Women Travel Abroad?
I didn’t set out to run a travel company. I set out to be a diplomat. I studied Arabic in college with this romantic idea of building bridges between cultures, reducing misunderstanding, and contributing to peace in some meaningful way. What I didn’t realize at the time was that travel would end up being the vehicle for all of that.
At 22, I took a job at a travel startup in Morocco. I thought it would be a chapter. It turned into three years. I loved the work so much — planning group trips for universities like Harvard and Duke, coordinating corporate events, and eventually organizing my first all-women’s small group tour through the country — that I just kept staying.
And working in travel there confirmed something I had believed since I started studying Arabic: travel is one of the most powerful tools for peace that exists.
It’s genuinely hard to visit a new country, sit at someone’s table, learn even a little of their language, and come home with your prejudices intact. You become an ambassador of that place whether you intend to or not.
For someone who had wanted to build bridges between cultures, the travel industry turned out to be exactly the right arena. It fed my entrepreneurial spirit and my deeper belief in what human connection across differences can do.
Then the pandemic hit, and like so much of the travel industry, my world in Morocco came to a stop. I returned to the US and ended up in corporate America, eventually finding my way into private equity.
I was good at it — running businesses on behalf of other people, making them more efficient, helping them grow. But after a few years, the itch became impossible to ignore. I kept thinking: what if I could own and operate something myself? And what if I could find my way back to travel while doing it?
I got lucky. Karamel, the founder of Women Travel Abroad, had just decided to sell the company at exactly the moment I was looking. In one of our first conversations, we realized we had both loved Morocco, and everything opened up from there.
We shared a conviction that travel should be about immersion rather than itinerary-ticking, about really learning a place rather than just seeing it. I wake up every day doing work that connects every thread of what I’ve always believed:
Travel builds understanding, women deserve to move through the world freely and confidently, and that the right group of people in the right place can change each other’s lives.
What surprised you most about taking over and running a women-focused travel company?
How deeply personal and emotionally fulfilling running the business is. I didn’t expect how often I’d find myself witnessing women mark enormous moments in their lives through travel.
Women come carrying all kinds of things. Some are celebrating — a milestone birthday, a retirement, a hard-won divorce finally behind them.
Some are overcoming something: a fear of flying, a fear of being alone, a fear that adventure has somehow aged out for them.
Some are quietly grieving and trying to find their way back to themselves.
All of them are trusting us with something that genuinely matters, and the responsibility of that is something I feel every single day.
I also didn’t expect the community to be so alive and so self-sustaining. The women who travel with WTA don’t just go on a trip and go home. They stay in touch with each other. They come back. They refer their friends. The bonds formed on these trips are real, and that community is genuinely one of the most remarkable things about this company.
Can you share a specific story of a woman whose life changed because of one of your trips?
There’s a woman from our Greece trip I think about often. It was her first time traveling solo, and her first time leaving the United States. She was introverted by nature and had signed up a little nervously — genuinely unsure whether she’d get along with a group of strangers or fit in with women she’d never met.
She was also coming out of a relationship, in that tender in-between space where you’re still figuring out who you are on your own again. She was reserved in the early days, warm but quiet, taking everything in more than putting herself out there.
What happened over the course of that week is what I love most about small group travel done right. The other women noticed her quietness and met it with patience, not pressure. There was no performance required.
Greece has a way of doing the heavy lifting — the light on the water, the food, the unhurried pace of it all — and somewhere in the middle of the trip, she just… opened.
She started initiating conversations. She ordered adventurously at dinner. She wandered off on her own for an afternoon and came back glowing.
On the last night she told me she hadn’t expected to feel so comfortable so quickly. That she’d been so afraid of not fitting in that she almost hadn’t come.
And that this trip had shown her something she was going to carry home: she was someone who could do hard and unfamiliar things solo. She had stepped out of her comfort zone and gained new found confidence.
She’s since already booked another trip.
What’s the most unexpected way you’ve seen travel transform a woman?
Confidence.
Women arrive on our trips with a certain relationship to their own bodies and minds. Many of our travelers are in their 50s, 60s, or 70s, and there’s often this anxiety that adventure is for younger people and that slowing down is inevitable.
Then over the course of the week, they navigate a new place and culture and they overcome language barriers to bargain at the souk or take a solo walk around the hotel’s neighborhood without relying on GPS. And something shifts.
They start to trust themselves again and their capacity to not just manage the unexpected but also find joy in it.
Travel doesn’t just change how women see the world. It changes how they see what they’re capable of.
Why do you think travel – specifically slow travel – creates such powerful experiences for women?
Because slow travel forces presence in a way that nothing else does. When you’re moving through a place on foot, at a human pace, you can’t scroll past the uncomfortable or the beautiful or the unfamiliar. You have to be in it.
For women especially, that enforced presence is radical. So much of women’s daily lives is structured around being needed by someone else — kids, partners, aging parents, coworkers. Travel removes you from that context entirely.
Suddenly you are the only person whose needs are on the agenda. That sounds simple. For a lot of women, it’s the first time in decades.
Slow travel also builds community in a way that fast-paced itineraries don’t. When you’re rushing from highlight to highlight, there’s no room for the real conversations. The ones that happen on a long walk after lunch, or waiting for a ferry, or sitting on a rooftop at dusk. Those unscheduled moments are where the connection actually lives. We protect those moments intentionally.
When women join your trips, what are they really looking for?
Permission. That’s the honest answer.
On the surface, they’re looking for a well-organized trip to a beautiful destination with people they’ll enjoy. And we deliver that.
But underneath it, most of the women who come to WTA are looking for permission to prioritize themselves.
To spend the money. To take the time. To go even though their partner doesn’t want to, or their kids think it’s indulgent, or their friends don’t understand why they’d want to travel with strangers.
Many of them have been putting this off for years. Something was always more urgent — a renovation, a wedding, a job transition.
WTA is often the first time they’ve ever booked something just for themselves, without a justification beyond the fact that they wanted it. That’s not a small thing. For a lot of women, it’s enormous. And we take it seriously.
How do you create space for women to feel safe, seen, and free on your trips?
It starts before the trip does. Every woman has a conversation with us before booking, so we can make sure the trip is the right fit—for her and for the group. Then our 90-60-30 day preparation process helps ensure no one arrives at the airport feeling like a stranger.
On the ground, intentional choices are everywhere.
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Small groups with a maximum of 10 women so no one gets lost in the crowd.
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Single occupancy rooms so everyone has their own private space to decompress.
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Female hosts who are attuned to the emotional landscape of the trip, not just the logistical one.
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Itineraries that build in real breathing room — free time to wander, rest, or simply sit with what you’re experiencing, without the pressure of a packed schedule.
What do you want every woman to take home with her after a WTA trip?
A recalibrated sense of what she’s capable of and the evidence to back it up.
Travel has a way of showing you yourself at your most resourceful and most open. You navigate something difficult. You connect with someone across a language barrier. You try a food you never would have ordered at home and love it. You get a little lost and find your way. These are small things individually, but cumulatively they build a story you tell yourself about who you are
Complete this sentence: “Women who travel together…”
Women who travel together stop performing and start living. There is something about shared adventure — the vulnerability of navigating the unknown, the laughter that comes from things going sideways in a foreign country, the intimacy of seeing someone out of their comfort zone and being out of yours alongside them — that strips away the careful presentation we maintain in ordinary life.
Women who travel together go home changed, and they take a piece of each other with them.
What advice would you give to a woman who wants to start travelling more but feels intimidated or doesn’t know where to begin?
The best advice I can give is to start smaller than you think you need to. If solo travel appeals to you but feels daunting, don’t begin with a flight to a foreign country. Begin with a weekend trip somewhere you can drive to. Somewhere new and interesting, but close enough that if you hate it, you can be home by Sunday night.
Low commitment, low stakes, and often surprisingly revelatory. A lot of women discover they’re much better company for themselves than they expected.
If solo travel feels like too big a barrier right now, find a group trip aligned with something you’re already passionate about. I want to be clear about how many options exist here — there are group trips for every interest and niche imaginable.
Women-only tours, foodie tours, wine tours, bike tours, yoga retreats, birding tours, art history tours. Whatever lights you up, there is a group of like-minded people traveling around it, and a company that has handled all the logistics so you don’t have to.
You get the motivation of exploring something you already love, the safety and support of a structured trip, and the very real chance of meeting people who share your interests in a way that’s hard to replicate at home.
What’s one thing women consistently tell you they didn’t expect from a women’s only trip?
How un-cliquey it is.
I think a lot of women arrive with a quiet fear in the back of their mind — some version of middle school, where groups of women together can feel competitive or exclusionary. It’s an understandable worry, but it almost never materializes, and I think the reason is built into the structure of our trips: 95% of our travelers come solo.
Nobody already has their person. Nobody has their established pair or their pre-formed alliance. Everyone is in the same position — arriving somewhere new, knowing no one, figuring it out together. That shared vulnerability is a remarkable equalizer.
I won’t oversell it and say every woman becomes best friends with every other woman on the trip. Personality differences exist, and that’s fine. But what women consistently tell me afterward is that the people were what made the trip. Not the destination, not the hotel, not the itinerary — the people.
The connections they didn’t expect to make with women they wouldn’t have otherwise crossed paths with. That tends to be the thing that surprises them most, and the thing they talk about longest after they get home.
Where do you dream of taking women next?
I’m genuinely excited about the destinations we already have in the pipeline, but the one I keep talking about is our Georgia trip in July 2027. The country, not the state.
Georgia is one of those places that most travelers haven’t been to yet, which is exactly what draws me to it. It sits at this extraordinary crossroads of Europe and Asia, with 8,000 years of winemaking history, dramatic Caucasus mountain peaks, ancient cave cities, and some of the most generous hospitality I’ve ever encountered.
On the trip we’ll be tasting wines fermented in buried clay vessels at female-run vineyards, cooking khachapuri over an open fireplace with a local woman in her 200-year-old home, and driving the Military Highway up to a 7,000-foot monastery with Mount Kazbek looming behind it.
It’s the kind of trip that makes people say “I can’t believe I’d never thought about going there.” That’s the sweet spot I’m always looking for.
More broadly, the destinations I dream about are always the ones that feel a little intimidating to go solo. Places where travelers are still a novelty rather than an industry, where the culture hasn’t been flattened by mass tourism, where you can still stumble into something unscripted and unrepeatable. Those are the experiences that change people.
What makes a woman a good fit for WTA trips?
The short answer is: open-mindedness.
If you care about more than checking places off a list and if what draws you to travel is the actual human experience of a new culture, the food, the history, the chance to meet local people and understand something about how they live, then you will love what we do.
Our trips are designed for women who want comfort without sacrificing immersion. You don’t have to be roughing it to have a meaningful experience, and we firmly believe that a beautiful hotel and a real conversation with a local artisan are not mutually exclusive. Our travelers want both, and that’s exactly what we build.
You should also come with a spirit of flexibility.
Travel doesn’t always go to plan, and the women who thrive on our trips are the ones who can meet the unexpected with curiosity rather than frustration.
Beyond that, the bar is simply this: be kind, be inclusive, and be genuinely interested in the world and the women traveling alongside you.
If that sounds like you, there’s likely a WTA trip with your name on it.
If you could say one thing to a woman who’s been thinking about joining a trip but keeps hesitating, what would it be?
Take the leap. It won’t get any easier.
The hesitation never really goes away on its own. There will always be a reason to wait — a work project, a family obligation, a number in your bank account you want to hit first, a version of yourself you think you need to become before you deserve this.
But the women who waited the longest to take that first trip are, without exception, the ones who come back and say “I wish I had done this sooner.”
The bravery doesn’t come before the decision. It comes because of it.
If you’re dreaming about your next adventure and like the idea of travelling with a women-only travel company that puts community and safety first, with no single supplements and a private room of your own, I encourage you to take a look at Women Travel Abroad.
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