Why We Don't Charge a Single Supplement

We do not charge a single supplement because we do not consider a private room an upgrade. It is the room. The price on our trip pages is the price for one woman in one room, and the same figure applies whether you arrive alone or with someone. What we offer instead is a companion rate: a reduced price for two people who choose to share.

This is our policy. Below, you'll find the math, because I think you're owed it.

What a single supplement actually is

A tour operator prices a trip assuming two people per room. That assumption lets them advertise a lower number. Then a woman books alone, the room she occupies is one they can no longer sell twice, and they charge her the difference. Often more than the difference.

On a premium small-group trip in Europe, a single supplement of $900 to $2,000 is unremarkable.

The mechanic is defensible. The room costs what the room costs.

What is not defensible is what it does. It builds a business on the assumption that a woman arrives partnered, and then bills her for the ways her life has not gone according to that assumption. Divorced. Widowed. Never married. Married to someone who does not want to go. Every one of those women pays a fee for a fact about her life.

That's not how I want to operate my company.

Show me the math, then

Fair. Here is roughly how a trip like The Awakening is built.

We buy the property on the coast outright. Not a block of rooms — the whole house, every night we are in it. That number is fixed. It does not move when a guest cancels and it does not move when two guests share. Ground transport is a coach and a driver: also fixed. The queer tour, the cooking class; the private dinners: mostly fixed. The genuinely variable costs — a seat at a table, a portion of the meal — are a small fraction of the total.

Which means the honest way to describe our economics is that the trip has a cost, and the guests divide it. A private room does not add cost to a bought-out house. It is what the house already contains.

So there is nothing to surcharge. There is only a number, divided.

Two people sharing a room, on the other hand, genuinely do reduce the trip's cost per person, because they occupy one room where the arithmetic expected two. That saving is real. We give it back to them, at the companion rate. We do not keep it and call the solo traveler's number a penalty.

Same fact, inverted. One version tells a woman traveling alone that she is a problem. The other tells two women traveling together that they have done us a small kindness.

Isn't the companion rate just a single supplement with better manners?

It is a reasonable question and I have turned it over more than once.

The distinction is which number is the real one. Under a single supplement, the advertised price is a price almost nobody pays, and the solo traveler is charged an exception. Under our structure, the price on the page is the price, paid by the woman traveling alone — and the exception runs in the other direction, toward the discount.

Nobody is ever charged more than the number they were shown. That is the test I would apply to anyone, including us.

What if I want to share with someone I've never met?

We will not ask you to.

Briefly: a stranger in your room is not a cost saving, it is a tax on rest, and it is levied disproportionately on women who cannot afford to buy their way out of it.

The companion rate is only ever for two people who arrived together and want to be in the same room. A wife. A sister. The friend of twenty years. Not a stranger, and not a stranger you were matched with by a spreadsheet.

What a private room actually costs

Monetarily, it's not cheap. A trip that will not sell you a shared bed cannot advertise the shared-bed price.

Our trip costs $7,500 per person. So does the nearest comparable trip in this category — if you want your own room. Theirs advertises at $3,250. Their deposit rate. Ours advertises at $7,500 - the real price.

That is not a criticism of their pricing. It is a description of how this category works, and it is the reason we price the way we do.

I wrote a more detailed post about what a private room actually costs in a separate post.

The tagline of this company is that we saved you a seat. It would be strange to save you a seat and then charge you for arriving on your own.

The Awakening runs May 28 to June 4, 2027. Request a seat.