What Two Women Said to Me That I Cannot Stop Thinking About

By Dr Sotiria Moschopoulou, Founder of RooMate

Last week I had two separate conversations with women I was meeting professionally. Both Greek. Both in their thirties. Both accomplished, thoughtful, the kind of women you'd describe as having it together.

We were talking about a possible collaboration. A normal business conversation. And somewhere in the middle of it, unprompted, both of them said something that stopped me in my tracks.

They don't travel alone.

Not because they don't want to. Not because they haven't tried. But because the fear of where they'll stay, who they'll meet, what might happen, it's just bigger than the desire to go.

One of them told me that even when she travels with her boyfriend, she specifically looks for a female landlady. Not a hotel. Not an Airbnb with a male host. A woman. Someone she can feel safe with before she even arrives.I'm not saying male hosts are unsafe. I'm saying that for some women, the feeling of safety starts before they arrive -and that feeling matters.

I sat with that for a long time after both conversations ended.

This is not a small thing

I want to be clear about something. These aren't women who lack confidence. They haven't been sheltered, and they've definitely seen the world. They're women who have done the calculation, the quiet, constant calculation that women do, and decided the risk isn't worth it.

That calculation happens before every trip. Before every new city. Before every room search. It's exhausting, and most people who don't do it have no idea it even exists.

When a woman tells you she doesn't travel alone because she doesn't feel safe, she's not being dramatic. She's being honest about something the travel industry, the rental industry, and honestly most of the world has decided isn't its problem to solve.

I built RooMate because I believe it is.

What fear actually looks like

Fear of solo travel for women isn't one thing. It's a stack of smaller fears piled on top of each other until the whole thing feels impossible.

It's the fear of arriving somewhere new at night and not knowing if the person waiting with the keys is actually safe.

It's the fear of being alone in a flat with a host you've never met and having no one who knows exactly where you are.

It's the fear of something feeling off and not knowing whether to trust that feeling or talk yourself out of it.

It's the fear of saying something happened and not being believed.

These fears aren't irrational. They're responses to real things that happen to real women. And they don't disappear just because you booked a highly-rated listing or read a few good reviews. They stay, quietly, in the background of every decision.

Why verification changes something real

Here's what I've come to believe: the fear doesn't go away entirely, but it shrinks the moment you actually know who you're dealing with. Not who someone says they are. Who they actually are.

This is why identity verification matters to me, not as a technicality, not as some checkbox to tick, but as a genuine act of respect between two people who are about to share a space or an introduction. When someone has verified their identity, linked their LinkedIn, connected their Airbnb hosting history, built up reviews from real people in real contexts, you're no longer meeting a stranger. You're meeting someone with a traceable, verifiable life.

That's not a small thing. That's the difference between a woman who books the trip and one who doesn't.

The ecosystem I'm building, and why it matters

RooMate isn't just a flatmake matching platform. It's my attempt to build something that's never quite existed: a trust infrastructure for women navigating cities.

The Trust Badge on RooMate isn't a logo. It represents verified identity, real reviews, connected profiles, LinkedIn, Airbnb, whatever a woman has built in her life that speaks to who she is. When you see it, you're not seeing a promise. You're seeing evidence.

And the Women's Ecosystem I'm building around it, verified female-owned businesses, services, spaces in Athens, is an extension of the same idea. Because the fear doesn't only live in the moment of finding a room. It lives in every interaction a woman has when she's new somewhere. The hairdresser. The doctor. The café where she goes to work. The woman who owns the corner shop and will remember her face.

Trust, built in layers, in a city that has your back.

That's what I'm trying to build. Not because it's a good business idea, though I do believe it is, but because two women sat across from me last week in professional meetings and told me, quietly, that they've stopped going places alone.

And I can't accept that as the answer.

If this resonates with you

If you're a woman who's made that same calculation, who's chosen not to go, not to try, not to book, I want you to know you're not alone in making it. And I want you to know this is exactly why RooMate exists.

And if you're a woman in Athens with a room to offer, who wants to be part of building something different, I want to hear from you too.

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Dr Sotiria Moschopoulou is a Greek dentist and Airbnb Superhostess and landlady based in London, and the founder of RooMate, a trust-based roommate matching platform for women in Athens, operating as a single-sex service under Schedule 3, Part 7 of the Equality Act 2010.