Single-parent holidays have a long way to go

Sophie Arie journeys to Costa Rica with her son on a trip designed for a travel tribe that is too often ignored

This summer I took my six-year-old son, Max, on a big adventure. Two weeks in Costa Rica, exploring volcanoes, spotting sloths, waking up in the jungle to the sound of howler monkeys and leaping over warm Pacific waves while iguanas sunbathed on the beach behind us.

The potential exhaustion of such an ambitious trip as a single parent with a six-year-old (only staying two nights in each place, several long days on the road in the rainy season, a 10-hour flight) was going to be, I reckoned, manageable because this was an organised tour with high-end accommodation in a country known for being safe and easy for travellers. Not only that, but it was also relatively keenly priced – always a consideration when you’re the sole breadwinner.

My son would be in his element. He would learn the names of every creature we saw and probably be reminding me of their particular mating and moulting habits for months to come. But would we – despite all that – survive being together non-stop for two weeks, sharing a room (in which we risked being eaten alive by large insects) without driving each other nuts? The only reason I even contemplated undertaking such a trip was because I knew we would not be alone. Not only that, we would be among other families like ours: this was a tour exclusively for solo-parent families.

There are about two million single parents in Britain and for the past decade official statistics have shown that they – we – are in charge of about a quarter of all British families. Of course, in family travel terms, this group is even larger: in addition to those widowed or divorced, or who have chosen to bring up children on their own, there are plenty of other single adults travelling with kids – think of all of the working couples and grandparents nominating a single adult among their number to look after children over the frequent school holidays. Solo-adult-with-child is an important but ignored travel tribe.

And yet, this demographic is particularly in need of organised group holidays. Until recently, travel operators had not really thought of offering holidays specifically for this demographic. If anything, they have put us off by pricing family holidays in ways that penalise adults who want to travel with kids on their own. In June, a survey by FairFX, the travel money experts, found that a single parent booking a package holiday alone with a child during peak season would pay as much as £500 more per adult than if they were travelling with a partner.

There are around two million single parents – they make up around a quarter of families with dependent children

family time, and it is nice not to feel like the odd ones out among couples. Being in a pool of parents who naturally do some of the things for each other that partners normally do (watch the bag and the kids while you go to the loo/get a beer/have a swim) helped everyone rest and relax more than they would on their own.

But what if you’re after a more adventurous holiday? Mango, another small, specialist British company, has run solo-parent holidays for the past 15 years, and says it has seen growing demand for active, long-haul trips.

And this year, for the first time, Intrepid, the global adventure travel company, launched a range of holidays exclusively for solo-parent families. Which is how my son and I found ourselves blundering about at 10pm on a wild Caribbean beach with five other single-parent families – no torches allowed – soaked to the skin by torrential rain, waiting for a peek under the tail of a huge green sea turtle as it dropped its soft, round eggs into a hole in the sand.

From start to finish, this was a trip packed full of exciting, spectacular and rare natural beauty. We crept up on tiny “blue jean frogs” in the rainforest, electric blue morpho butterflies landed on the children’s hands and we watched a sloth going nowhere along an overhead wire specially installed so these famously slow-moving creatures can cross roads without getting run over.

Our trip also featured man-made fun, in the form of white water rafting, zip lining and walking on bridges suspended over the jungle, as well as surfing and a chance to leap off a

AROUNDOF SINGLE PARENTS ARE WOMEN

FLYING SOLOSome travel companies have started offering fairer pricing and bespoke trips for single parents