WayAway, a travel meta-search company, is bringing attention to the need for better trip preparation resources so that women can feel secure while they are on their own around International Women's Day.

In response to this year's UN Women 8th March topic of "DigitALL: innovation and technology for gender equality," WayAway is urging the travel technology sector to use its significant creative capabilities and resources to address this troubling issue.
Yet, a recent survey on the WayAway website revealed that four times as many women as men believed that "traveling alone is risky," although Google searches for "solo female travel" have quadrupled over the past 10 years.

Meanwhile, scholarly research suggests that too many of those females who do travel alone do so by "internalizing the normality of unsafety" and that their anxieties have "overall negative consequences on travel intentions".

"We find it shocking that more than 100 years after the inaugural International Women's Day, so many women still don't feel as safe traveling alone as men," says Janis Dzenis, Head of PR & Communications at WayAway.

"When it comes to travel, it seems like every conceivable tool has been created for every conceivable niche, but for female solo travelers, the technology on offer is, with a few notable exceptions, generally of low quality and, more significantly, is not widely accessible. How many websites, for instance, offer filters that may meet these requirements? Or how many let you view comments and ratings from only women?

"There is a tremendous financial payoff on offer as well for those travel technology companies that can make a difference in this area: female travelers would naturally gravitate towards, perhaps even swamp, travel platforms that can provide them with the certainties they desire."