The Solo Female Travel Safety Guide

Kayla Floyd is a travel safety educator, writer, and veteran solo traveler with over fifteen years of experience navigating more than sixty countries across six continents. Her expertise grew from practical necessity: she took her first solo trip at nineteen with a backpack, a copy of *A Woman Alone*, and no real understanding of what she was getting into. After a harrowing encounter with a predatory taxi driver in Guatemala City her second week on the road, she realized that the safety advice available to women travelers was either fearmongering ("Don't travel alone") or dangerously vague ("Just be careful"). She began documenting everything she learned the hard way—the specific strategies, the cultural nuances, the scripts for difficult conversations, and the logistical systems that kept her safe trip after trip.

Floyd founded the Solo Travel Safety Project, a platform that combines destination-specific safety research with community-driven reporting from thousands of women travelers worldwide. Her work has been featured in *Outside Magazine*, *The Guardian*, *Travel + Leisure*, and *Cosmopolitan*, and she has delivered safety workshops for organizations including the Girl Scouts of the USA, the International Women's Travel Center, and multiple university study-abroad programs. She has appeared as a guest expert on NPR's *All Things Considered* and the *Women Who Travel* podcast, where she is known for refusing to soften the truth about risks while always emphasizing that the answer is preparation, not surrender.

Floyd holds a degree in International Relations from the University of Chicago and has completed professional training in situational awareness, conflict de-escalation, and wilderness first response. She is certifed in CPR and AED use through the American Red Cross. She currently splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and wherever her next research trip takes her. Her personal travel philosophy is simple: the world belongs to everyone, and women deserve to see it on their own terms. This is her first book.