Featured image: Sisterhood Travels helps women find sisterhood through adventure, like in the Costa Rican rapids | Photo provided by Sisterhood Travels

Woman-owned travel company helps women take the first step

by Carolyn Ray

During her long career as a case manager at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, N.C., Stacey Ray was always being asked for travel advice from the doctors and nurses. A passionate traveller, together with her husband, they travelled to more than 80 countries, learning along the way. But when her husband Mike passed away in 2017, she wasn’t sure what to do.

“I was 58 years old,” she remembers. “Half my friends were still working, half didn’t have the money, the rest of them didn’t have an interest in travel. There was always some kind of obstacle. So, with no research whatsoever, just gut instinct, I said ‘There’s got to be a lot of women out there just like me, who want to travel solo but don’t know where to start.”

She launched Sisterhood Travels with a Facebook group of about 250 of her friends and colleagues. Today, Sisterhood Travels offers more than 50 immersive women-only itineraries around the world, such as Hong Kong and Bali, Japan and Seoul and the North and South Island of New Zealand. Sisterhood Travels is also launching a 20-day luxury French River Cruise with Uniworld in July 2025.

Getting started on a new adventure

“I started with Iceland because I know it inside and out,” she says.” I had 20-plus women sign up for this small little group that I had going. Then I did another one. And then COVID came along. All the trips were cancelled, and all I kept thinking was, I have to give this money back whether I get the money back from my suppliers or not. I could not sleep at night if I chose to be a bad actor. I just couldn’t do it. I refunded all the women their money back out of my personal pocket, which, quite frankly, I didn’t really have.”

During COVID, she returned to the hospital and worked in the ICU, four to five 12-hour shifts a week for 19 months.

“Around the 16-month period, when I saw that there was going to be a light at the end of this tunnel, I started preparing trips again, starting with Iceland,” she says. “And guess what? The people who learned that I had integrity booked again because they could trust me. They knew I wasn’t going to do anything to hurt them in any way.”

What makes women-only travel different

Designing women’s trips requires a very different set of skills, Ray says.

“I create all the itineraries myself, and I’m very invested in them,” she says. “There are certain components that are critical to me. One is that, above all else, we must be good global citizens. That’s huge. Number two, I try to allow, in every trip we do, opportunities for cultural immersion and special experiences with who I call ‘our sisters’ in these destinations.”

On some trips, Ray arranges for women to meet the leading human rights advocate in that country; a woman who has helped change laws in that country. Or, she might take women to a woman-owned restaurant that shares her story of how women can be self-employed and be successful. Or, there might be a dinner with an influential woman such as an author.

“Our women love these experiences,” she says. “We do a lot home visits on our trip, to families who want to do that as a money-making experience for themselves that they need. But also, they love the cultural exchange as well.”

When it comes to empowering women, however, Ray says it’s not just about travel. Travel is a huge learning opportunity when it’s done right, she believes.

“It’s also things like how do you navigate an airport?” she says. “Or, how do you decide whether you want the chicken or the fish for dinner? They become skilled, but primarily, we want them to have confidence. And you can’t teach confidence. It has to be built and develop on its own.”

“Through travel, I’ve learned so much more about myself,” Ray says. “I’ve learned who I am. What my boundaries are. How compassionate, really, am I?”

The widow’s club

As a widow herself, Ray wants to help women who have never travelled before, or whose husbands made all the decisions. Some widowed women, she says, feel the need to ask their children for permission, or say their children aren’t comfortable with them travelling with people they don’t know.

“Being a widow is a special club, one that none of us particularly wants to join,” she says. “But I can tell you, there is an absolute difference between say widowed women and married women whose partners don’t travel, or with divorced women. Widows tend to be the most timid, initially. Very few women, especially because we’re in an age group where, when we grew up, we were still on that cusp of letting the man handle everything. No, I want to exert myself. No, let the man handle it. You know, it’s like that.”

When going through the grief process, there a lot of steps for women to get through, she says. Many times, widows think they’re supposed to keep moving, so they sign up for a trip.

“I always say to them, “Only you will know when you’re truly ready to do this. Do not force yourself to feel like this is going to take care of your grief.”

Others tell her that her trips have changed their lives.

“My response is always the same,” she says. “I have not changed your life. You’ve changed your life. We gave you a vehicle to do it and we are so proud of you for grabbing on to that opportunity.”

She remembers one woman who brought her to tears on a trip.

“It was on the first girlfriend getaway that I ever did. I had chartered a catamaran in the Dominican Republic, and one of the women looked at me and she was laughing, and then all of a sudden she started crying. And I said, “Oh my goodness, Cathy, are you okay?”

Through her tears, she replied, “Stacey, I just realized this is the first time I’ve laughed since my husband died.”

“Of course, I was sobbing,” Ray says. “I know how that feels.”

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