How to Avoid Single Supplements When Travelling Alone

Countless travellers across the globe enjoy travelling solo, often on the grounds that it enables personal pacing. However, while travelling alone can have many advantages, it also poses certain setbacks – one being the infamous ‘single supplement’ fees imposed by many hotels.

A single supplement is a fee applied to solo travellers, in order to compensate a hotel for losses incurred due to single occupancy – for example, the fixed utility and cleaning costs of a room, which stay the same no matter how many people are staying in the room. It is based on the fact that most hotel rooms are built with the assumption of double occupancy. The result is that single travellers often pay the same price that two people would pay to share a room.

Those who tend to travel alone try to avoid single supplements as much as possible; but unfortunately, it doesn’t always seem like an easy task. Single supplements are a commonality in the hotel industry, and hotels usually won’t budge on the fee. However, some hotels do offer services and options for single travellers who wish to avoid the fee. For instance, a hotel might offer a roommate finding service – in other words, a service that matches single travellers up with other solo travellers. In addition, there are many single traveller networks that make it easier for a solo traveller to make such an arrangement on their own – for instance, websites where you can post a request for a travel roommate in a given destination.

Of course, you can also find a variety of tour companies that cater specifically to single travellers – many of which offer single supplement-free or fee-reduced itineraries. Within such offers, tour operators use their buying power to get a waive on out-of-season single supplements, or to negotiate a lower single supplement. In some cases, tour operators can get hotels to extend offers that are entirely single supplement-free. Such offers range in flexibility, with some open for all days of travel, and others extended only on selected dates.

So, while avoiding single supplements might not seem so easy, there are actually many ways to go about getting the fee waived, or simply sourcing single supplement-free travel offers. Utilise resources such as single traveller networks and tour companies that cater to single travellers, and you’ll be on your way to booking a trip with no single supplements.