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Home :: Solo Travel Articles :: Make Room For The Solo Travelers

As a traveler who has visited all seven continents mostly solo, I've had much experience with the single supplement, the fee that travel operators charge to compensate for what they consider "lost" revenue for double-occupancy-rated tour packages. This fee can range from $150 to $1,000 per traveler depending on group size, trip itinerary and the negotiating power of the company.

Inherent to the double-occupancy-rated business model is the assumption that humans always travel in pairs. The single supplement is a "minus one" paradigm that perceives solo travel as a default rather than a choice. It penalizes the traveler for being companion-free when instead - given the burgeoning solo travel market - it should be rewarding these "plus ones" for fueling the industry.

According to the Travel Industry Association of America, 34.8 million adults have taken a vacation alone in the past three years. Many solo travelers enjoy the freedom of embracing the world on their own terms, and a sizable number of adults are no longer putting their wanderlust on hold in the absence of a travel companion.

For the record, solo is not synonymous with single, as in marital or companionship status. Many travelers who are happily married or partnered, travel solo for a variety of reasons. Of the 10 solo travelers on my eight-day hiking trip of the Grand Canyon, seven were married or had partners and one had dependent children. Smart companies have recognized this trend and are positioning themselves as "solo-friendly." Included among their policies is dampening the sting of the single supplement.

Some large, well-established operators have the clout to offer a limited number of single rooms on some of their tours. Solo travel networks are also using their negotiating power to offer low or no single supplements to their members. This is a good start. But what is required is a wholesale restructuring of the erroneous assumptions that underlie the travel industry's pricing models.

In his "Budget Travel" online, Arthur Frommer wrote that the single supplement "can't be overcome; it is part of the economics of hotel-keeping or cruise-operating that most rooms and cabins are capable of being occupied by two persons." I disagree. If architects can learn to design women's public restrooms with more stalls, they can also learn to design hotels with more single rooms.

The solution, says Frommer, is for solo travelers to bargain, "to be conscious of their right to request a better price, and to 'shop around' until such a rate is secured." That works when one is traveling solo and independently vs. with a group tour. My experience has been that hotels don't charge double-occupancy rates for a solo traveler when that traveler books it directly, even if the room is built for two. Rather, most offer single-occupancy rates for solo travelers.

Yet, independent, solo travel can be one woman's joyful flexibility and another woman's logistical nightmare. Chief among the advantages of traveling solo within a group is the pleasure of simply showing up. And it is largely when solo travelers seek the same group advantages that people traveling in pairs enjoy that we are assessed 40 percent to 100 percent on the cost of double-occupancy rates.

Solo travelers have done enough of the heavy lifting. We have paid the dreaded single supplement. Or we have relinquished our privacy to room with strangers to avoid it. We have booked trips half a year in advance just to snag one of the handfuls of single rooms that some operators offer at no additional cost. And in some cases, we've been willing to share accommodations only to discover that when our assigned roomie cancels at the last minute, the single supplement is ours to pay once more.

Rather than ignore the consumer power of 34.8 million adults, the travel industry must adjust its financial assumptions to better reflect this market reality, especially because the number of solo travelers is expected to rise.

Because humans travel not only in pairs and clans but also solo, pricing a percentage of each tour based on single occupancy is an economic model that makes better sense than requiring one traveler to supplement the cost of a spreadsheet-fabricated companion.