The Entrepreneurial Risk Of Like-Minded Women

Finito World

I like travelling alone because it removes the most expensive hidden cost in any journey: other people’s preferences.

This is not misanthropy with a passport. It is simply efficiency, solitude and authorship rolled into one hand-luggage-sized liberation. Alone, I can leave when I want, eat when I want, walk where I want, and decide that getting lost is not a logistical error but an editorial choice. I can spend two hours in a market and eight minutes in a museum. I can decide that lunch is the destination. I can sit in silence without anyone asking whether I am all right, which is often the fastest route to not being all right.

So when I first heard about Avandra, a travel concept for women who want to travel independently but not necessarily alone, my first reaction was not admiration. It was dread.

Women? Together? Like-minded women? On holiday?

The phrase “like-minded women” always worries me. It is meant to imply warmth, intelligence, wit, shared curiosity and civilised conversation. It can also imply a Stepford convention with better accessories. Freud is supposed to have asked what women want. I cannot answer for women generally, although I suspect “not being asked by Freud” would have ranked quite high. I can answer for myself. I do not want a holiday that becomes a committee.

I know this territory rather too well. I once wrote a fictionalised novel called School’s Out: You Don’t Know Who Your Friends Are Until You Go On Holiday With Them, about a group of playground mothers going to Cornwall and discovering, with surgical precision, that friendship is easy at the school gate and rather more complex when everyone has a different definition of luxury, budget, parenting, food, mess, timekeeping and what constitutes “relaxed”. You do not really know your friends until you have shared a fridge, a bathroom rota, a restaurant bill and the question of whether a rainy Tuesday requires a bracing coastal walk or a bottle of wine at lunch.

I know it in life as well as fiction. I used to bring groups of women to my house in France every year. In theory, it was idyllic: an old house, heat, pool, courtyard, food, wine, space and conversation. In practice, as the years went on, the women became increasingly alpha. They did not arrive as guests so much as temporary chief operating officers.

One would redesign the itinerary because she had “had a thought”. Another would rearrange the kitchen because it “flowed better”. A third would take a view on towels, bins, timings, salads, routes, shops, shade, room allocation and the correct moral position on rinsing plates before putting them in the dishwasher. They did not mean badly. That was the problem. They meant extremely well. All CEOs, even on holiday. By the second day, the washing up had stakeholders.

Jung wrote about the shadow, the part of ourselves we do not acknowledge. In capable women, the shadow often appears holding a tea towel and saying, “Actually, I find it easier if we do it this way.”

This is why Avandra interests me, but not as something to praise or sell. It interests me as a useful provocation. It exposes a problem many entrepreneurs miss. Customers often want the opposite of what the market thinks they want.

The obvious reading is that women travelling alone want company. The less obvious reading is that many women travelling alone love being alone, but dislike the penalties attached to it. That is a very different business problem.

A woman alone may not feel lonely. She may feel free. What she may dislike is being given the bad table, patronised by hotel staff, overmanaged by guides, or treated as a woman temporarily missing a husband. She may not want someone to hold her hand through Lisbon. She wants Lisbon to stop behaving as if her hand should be held.

This is the first entrepreneurial lesson. The visible problem is rarely the real one. The visible problem is travel. The real problem is dignity.
Many women in midlife are not short of competence. They have booked flights, schools, dentists, care homes, Christmas, funerals and the emotional infrastructure of entire families. They can organise travel. They may simply be tired of organising everything. Competence is not the same as appetite for admin.

The founder story around Avandra, with Debbie Flynn, grown-up sons and a husband apparently keener on golf than tango in Argentina or wine tasting in Napa, is useful because it starts in life rather than theory. One person wants Buenos Aires. Another wants the back nine. Between those two desires lies a business question, several marriages and a great deal of silent packing.

The answer should not automatically be “put the women together”. That is the conventional move, and conventional moves often create conventional problems.

Reverse it. Do not ask how to bring women together. Ask how to let women remain independent near one another. Do not ask how to create bonding. Ask how to avoid capture. Do not ask what women want to do as a group. Ask what women want permission not to do.
This is lateral thinking at its most practical. The value may lie not in the club, the trip or the itinerary, but in the removal of social friction.

The phrase linked to Avandra, “women who choose wine from the middle of the wine list”, works because it defines a psychology rather than a demographic. “Women aged 45 to 70 with disposable income” may satisfy a media planner, but it does not breathe. The middle-wine-list woman does. She is not ordering the cheapest bottle to apologise for pleasure. She is not ordering the most expensive to perform success. She wants judgement, ease, proportion and taste.

That is a better market definition because it describes behaviour. Entrepreneurs should notice. Strong niches are emotional before they are statistical.

The second lesson is that customers often want contradictory things. They want freedom and support. Safety and independence. Company and escape. Recognition and privacy. A weak business flattens those contradictions. A stronger one designs around them.
Group travel often fails here because it solves isolation by imposing togetherness. This can be like curing insomnia with a brass band. Everyone arrives declaring themselves relaxed. By day two, someone is unofficial leader. Someone resents her. Someone else has dietary requirements with constitutional force. By day three, the group has foreign policy.

A more intelligent model is the parallel trip. People share a destination, perhaps a hotel, perhaps a few dinners, perhaps a guide or cultural encounter, but not every hour. One woman goes to a gallery. Another walks. Another stays in bed reading and calls it recovery. They meet later, or they do not. Nobody takes attendance.

This is not antisocial. It is adult behaviour with better lighting.

The third lesson is that the destination is not the business. Buenos Aires, Napa, Kyoto, Grasse, Seville, Venice, Iceland and the Douro are all attractive. So what? Destinations are plentiful. The filter is the value.

What makes a place good for an independent woman? Is the solo diner treated properly? Is the lighting humane? Is the guide intelligent? Is the transfer safe? Is the bathroom designed by someone who has met a woman? Is the experience genuinely textured, or merely “authentic” in the way supermarket jam is artisanal?

These questions are not decorative. They reveal the commercial opportunity. Businesses often focus on the thing being sold. Customers often buy relief: relief from awkwardness, relief from over-explaining, relief from being patronised, relief from organising everyone else, relief from choosing between isolation and entrapment.

There is also a lesson in restraint. Not every idea needs to become a movement, an app, a manifesto and a range of candles. Entrepreneurs often ruin insights by shouting them into cliché. The independent woman does not need to be told she is brave. She does not need empowerment language unless trapped beside a hen party and requiring extraction. She wants practical elegance. Ease. Choice. The right to disappear beautifully.

The deeper lesson is that customers often buy relief from a feeling they have not named. That feeling may not be loneliness. It may be fatigue. It may be irritation. It may be the desire to be alone without being treated as incomplete. It may be the desire for company without capture.
The woman in the middle of the wine list is useful because she tells us something precise. She wants pleasure with judgement, freedom with support and company without being absorbed into a travelling management structure.

Any entrepreneur who understands that has learned something valuable.

And if there is a dishwasher involved, leave it alone.