The Real Reason You Haven’t Traveled Solo Yet

They charge you extra for sleeping alone.

That’s not a joke. Book a tour or a cruise by yourself and there’s a fee sitting right there on the bill. They call it the single supplement.

On a $5,000 trip it can add another $1,500 on top. The only reason is that you’re one person instead of two.

It is infuriating. I know!

It’s the same thing that happens when you eat at a restaurant alone. The server drops your water and then spends the whole night at the four-top by the window, because they’ve decided your check isn’t worth much.

But don’t they know that if a woman is brave enough and strong enough to sit down and eat by herself, she’s also wise enough to know good service when she gets it and tip like there were two of you at that table?

Nobody thinks it through. They just look at one woman and see half a customer.

What really happens the night you don’t book

Let me tell you what I think is going on.

You’ve been looking at that cruise for weeks. You finally sit down and pick your cabin and your dates and you fill in all your information.

Then you get all the way to checkout, and there it is. The fee. The price you had in your head this whole time was never the real price.

Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I’d feel. You might feel like you got duped.

Like somebody was sitting there the whole time waiting for you to get far enough in that you’d just pay it. And now you feel a little foolish, and nobody likes feeling foolish, so you close the laptop.

Then you’re mad. You don’t want to give those people your money anymore, and honestly, good.

But you also just burned two hours and you have nothing to show for it. And the thought of starting the whole search over with a different company makes you tired down to your bones.

So the trip doesn’t happen. And a week later when somebody asks, you say you’re just not ready yet.

You are ready.

There’s a big survey every year that asks women what stops them from traveling alone. Everybody quotes the safety part, but money tied with safety. Nobody ever mentions that half.

I think we don’t say it out loud because “I’m scared” sounds better than “I got taken.”

You have the courage. The math just isn’t mathing in your favor as a solo traveler, and that is a completely different problem than the one you’ve been beating yourself up about.

And this is how I do it

I’ve never paid that fee, not once, because my bed comes with me.

There’s no room to split, so there’s nothing for them to charge me for. Nobody gets to surprise me at checkout, because there is no checkout.

But forget the fee for a second, because that’s the small part. Here’s the actual trade.

That cruise gives you seven days. Somebody else picked the ports, somebody else picked the times, and you’re back on the boat by five whether the town was getting good or not.

The same money, spent your way, buys you three weeks. Maybe four.

Three weeks means you stand in front of the thing you’ve only ever seen on Instagram. You stand there in the morning before the buses come, and you stay as long as you want because nobody is waiting on you.

It means you find a town you weren’t planning on and you stay an extra two days because it’s beautiful and you feel like it.

It means you sit at a little winery in the afternoon and talk to whoever sits down next to you. A real conversation with a real person, not a scheduled excursion with forty strangers wearing the same sticker.

That afternoon costs you about what one day of tips costs on a ship.

That’s the part nobody puts in the brochure. You’re not trading down to a sleeping bag and granola bars.

You’re trading a week of being managed for a month of being free, and it’s the same money either way.

I’m not telling you to sell the house on Tuesday. I’m telling you that you’ve been working on your courage when you should have been working on your setup, and the setup is the cheap part.

Rita