Safety for Solo Travelers

Traveling solo, or even when with friends in foreign places, it is always important to consider safety, and I feel this is even more applicable to solo women. I don't mean to sound any alarms, but only to provide some points of consideration to help you feel safer when traveling.

​

1. Walk around the area you're staying in during the day and become familiar with your surroundings. What are the restaurants and business near you. If its late at night, will the area become super dark or vibrant? Be prepared for what you'll see if you come back last from you dinner.

​

2. Be approachable and make friends with folks in your hotel. You'll feel safer venturing out with them if you're trying to check out the night life. And as a bonus you're all heady back to the same hotel.

​

3. Stay well rested. Staying alert during your travels to unknown areas is key. In big cities pick-pockets are abundant and when you're not looking (and usually we aren't really looking since we're site seeing). Being tired means your guard is down and you may become easy pray.   

​

4. Take photos of all of your documents and have them uploaded to the cloud. At this point I'm assuming something went wrong and you need to show documents to the authorities. I learned this the hard way when my rental car was stolen from my hotel parking lot in Costa Rica and I needed to share the make, license plate and other info (luckily the rental place had gps!). All ended well for me, but I learned my lesson.

​