You know the solo travel world has come into its own when The Washington Post does an entire travel section on it.
One article offers eight tips ensuring a "trip of ease."
Some obvious tips include using common sense when it comes to safety and talking to locals. One you don't hear as often is the recommendation to travel places where the dollar is strong. Agreed.
It's always fun to go somewhere you can live like royalty for very little money, but it's that much more important when you're not sharing expenses.
Meeting a tiny Irish tourist, Inishmoor Island, Ireland
In another of the articles, the writer calls solo travel the "All About Me" trip. "More myselves and Is are venturing out into the world alone," she writes. Good for them!
"Ideal for solo travelers," says the press release from Western River Expeditions about its rafting trips on the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon, Utah. I vouch for that statement.
I had one of the best trips of my life floating on peaceful sections of the river and holding on for dear life through Class III and IV rapids (read: "big"). And camping by the side of the river with new friends who I was happy to spend every minute with.
These are professionally guided rafting trips with all meals and equipment provided. I call them "one-phone call" vacations because you sign up and then let the company do all the work of getting licenses, providing boats and setting out food.
I now throw out the idea of "singles" travel for those who might be interested in joining a tour composed solely of people traveling alone, who are presumably not married.
I have not gone with the group Singles Travel Service, but I'm on the email list and they recently sent me a newsletter on some of their future trips.
The Chicago Tribune has a piece on how solo travelers can buy vacation packages without getting fleeced by the single supplement. I've written about these points before but they always bear repeating.
If you're willing to share a room, many tour operators will match you with someone of the same sex, eliminating the single supplement. Some will waive it, even if you end up with a private room due to an odd number of men or women on the trip. Don't get your heart set on it. You have to be lucky for circumstances to work out that way.
Booking early or late can help, as can going with smaller tour operators willing to negotiate.
The Tribune story says the single supplement is typically 200 percent. I don't believe that. On cruises, maybe. But I've been on a lot of vacation tours (biking, rafting, horseback riding and more) and perused many a travel catalog. I've never seen the single supplement listed as 200 percent.
Instead, you usually end up having to pay several hundred dollars more than those who bunk with another, whether friend, partner or spouse. That's because the hotels charge by the room and if you're just one person, you can't split it with anyone. But that's not the tour operator's fault. It's the way of hotel pricing. The tour operator books a certain number of rooms and if two people are sharing a room, the overall costs are lower.
Over the years I've experienced most of the above. I've shared rooms with someone the tour company matched me with. I've gotten my own room because I was the "odd man out" among the women on the trip - the lucky one who asked for a share but got a single. I had a single when I was on a rafting trip because the sleeping quarters were tents. Which is not necessarily standard. On a camping and biking trip, I was assigned a tentmate.
I've rotated roommates on a trip where there were three solo female travelers. I thought that was a good, fair system, rather than giving the single room to one person for the entire trip. The only problem was, I got so friendly with the other two solo female travelers I felt lonely on the nights I got the private room! There they were chatting and laughing without me!
Anyway, don't let a single supplement put you off taking a vacation package with a tour operator. Choose one of the above options. Or, if you choose a private room, calculate if there are savings based on group travel and transportation that the tour is providing that you wouldn't have gotten on your own.
If you can't bear the idea of sharing with a stranger or paying a single supplement, I'm out of ideas for group trips for you. But if you're willing to try the roommate route, just remember that you won't be spending a lot of time in your room anyway, particularly on an adventure trip...the kind I like to promote here.
Winter visitors to Yellowstone National Park have the park, and the herds of native bison, practically to themselves. Apparently, it's a pretty special place to be in the next few months.
“Winter for us means terrific cross country skiing, a sense of quiet and solitude and truly unparalleled opportunities for wildlife viewing,” said Jeff Brown, director of education for the Yellowstone Association Institute.
The bears may be hibernating, and the migratory birds off to warmer places, but otherwise the winter months are a great time to see wolves, elk and bison in their natural habitat. Without all the two-legged tourists getting in the way. Now that's adventure travel.
The non-profit institute offers private tours for small groups but also a "Lodging & Learning" program that provides guides for daily field trips, along with lodging in park hotels.
In a separate program, experts teach multi-day field seminars on wildlife, geology, history and more, a great way for solo travelers to get to hang with other people. You know, talk, laugh, discuss cougar mating habits.
Some of the courses are held at the Institute's Lamar Buffalo Ranch field campus, where you can stay in cabins for $30 a night per person. Sounds like no single supplement to me.
"Learn to take great pictures while touring DC's favorite locations." What a cool concept for solo travelers from out of town.
Lynford Morton of PhotoTour Excursions offers two, two, two events in one. (okay, only the older among us will remember that chewing gum commercial. Or was it mints?) Photo lessons and a tour of the area at the same time.
You meet up either at the Lincoln Memorial for DC monuments or in Annapolis (think Chesapeake Bay, U.S. Naval Academy, boats) or in Adams Morgan, a neighborhood in DC full of ethnic restaurants and funky buildings.
Then you get to hang with locals and visitors who show up for the class and talk photography, where you're from and anything else that comes up during your wanderings. So it's fine to go solo.
I chose the Adams Morgan class. Eight of us met on a sunny Sunday morning. Most had pretty nice cameras but didn't know much about them. Two had point and shoots.
The best part of the tour was that Lyn gave personal attention to each of us, looking at our photos and showing us how to use various settings.
Fellow travel writer Laura Byrne Paquet ended up in Amsterdam's Red Light District doing...well...not what you think. Paquet and her husband, tourists from Canada, had arranged a special meeting.
Paquet chose dinner at the home of a couple who wrote on the site that they loved to cook traditional Dutch food. She whipped out a credit card to cover the cost for a four- to five-course dinner and voila. She had a "reservation" for dinner. At someone's home.
One of the highlights of such a dinner, in my mind, is learning about a neighborhood in richer detail than you can from a guidebook. Paquet's host described a project to restrict prostitution in the famed red-light district and encourage upscale businesses to move in.
Over multiple glasses, the foursome also talked about the intricacies of Dutch politics. We get some of those stories here in Washington, D.C. I would have enjoyed hearing a Dutch point of view.
It almost seems as if solo travel is becoming the vogue.
The Los Angeles Times has a story on 10 vacations for solo travelers. It covers just about every option you can think of, from road trips to special-interest vacations to choosing villages over big cities.
Another highly useful LA Times story suggests ways to avoid the single supplement, from setting up a Google alert using the words "single supplement waived" to booking with companies such as Adventure Life to letting a tour company pair you with a roommate, which many will do.
A story in the Guardian offers strategies for traveling alone by a veteran solo traveler. And the rationale. "You travel alone, you do exactly as you want," says author Jenny Diski. Being on vacation with others makes her anxious. "Are they comfortable, happy, restless, bored?"
I totally get this. You feel selfish if you don't consider others' needs and yet you've paid all this money for a short time in a vacation place. Compromises make you feel resentful.
My absolute LEAST favorite words while on vacation are, "Do you mind if..." If I've had to say those words it means I've had to ask permission to do something I want to do.
Not permission, exactly, but I've had to let someone else know I want to do it and hope they come along happily or want to do the same. If not, I find myself thinking that I'm boring them or keeping them waiting. And how many times am I willing to do that? Argh.
Solo Friendly offers five reasons for solo travelers to take an organized tour. They include the ability to socialize, letting someone else do the driving and navigating and hearing the interesting stories of locals who are hired as tour guides on these trips.
National Geographic says it chooses these tours for the "outfitters' commitment to authenticity, immersion, sustainability, and connection."
One example is a tour in northern India that "has you riding camels, rickshaws, rafts, and jeeps
to observe leopards, rhinos, monkeys, mongoose, and more at five
national parks and wildlife refuges." Er, except that it costs more than $7,000 for the 19-day trip.
My rich friends, please tell me how fabulous it was when you return!
"Ideal for solo travelers," says the press release from Western River Expeditions about its rafting trips on the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon, Utah. I vouch for that statement.
I had one of the best trips of my life floating on peaceful sections of the river and holding on for dear life through Class III and IV rapids (read: "big"). And camping by the side of the river with new friends who I was happy to spend every minute with.
These are professionally guided rafting trips with all meals and equipment provided. I call them "one-phone call" vacations because you sign up and then let the company do all the work of getting licenses, providing boats and setting out food.
I landed on this chat about a traveler wanting to find a place to ski that offers rooms for one without a single supplement.
The comments range from "Singles are losers to be exploited" to "unfortunately the economies of being a hotelier make it difficult to achieve what you want" to "I travel on my own mostly and do not find it difficult to get single rooms in hotels and do not pay a supplement."
One of the people who posted about the "great single room debate" says she travels in a group of four people, none of whom want to share a room. I don't blame them. You hit a certain age and lifestyle...
She says she and her friends have managed to find hotels that charge either a small single supplement or none at all because they have single rooms.
She mentions hotels in the the ski resorts of Pila, Italy (Hotel Europe), Val D'isere, France
(Chalethotel Moris, no supplement as they actually have single rooms),
Sallbach, Austria (Bergers SportHotel) and Ischgl, Austria. (Hotel Alpenrose). Write these down for the future.
You might find it interesting to read the varying points of view, many resisting the idea that solo travelers are a group to be catered to. And the notion that it all comes down to cold, hard cash for the tour operator or the hotel. No news there.
The final comment, last time I read the thread was: Get a better job / marry a rich man / win the lottery / rob a bank, as suits and stay in nicer accommodation.
Okay, gotta go buy a dual-purpose ski mask. First using it to rob a bank. Then to enjoy my week on the slopes in Europe.
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