Cruise prices are quoted per person for two sharing a cabin. Travel alone and most lines charge a single supplement on top, usually enough to double the price. We compare the one-guest fare against the two-sharing rate on every sailing we track, so you can see the penalty before you book, and skip the sailings where it’s worst.
Every sailing we can price for one guest, the whole fleet rather than just the standouts. Typical is the median: half of this line’s sailings are cheaper for a solo traveller, half are more expensive. Best is the lowest supplement the line offers anywhere right now.
| Cruise line | Typical | Best | Sailings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costa Cruises | +47% | None | 869 |
| Virgin Voyages | +52% | +6% | 403 |
| MSC Cruises | +63% | None | 4,595 |
| Norwegian Cruise Line | +65% | +32% | 1,545 |
| Disney Cruise Line | +82% | +63% | 681 |
| TUI Cruises | +85% | −9% | 459 |
| Carnival Cruise Line | +86% | +41% | 2,577 |
| Celebrity Cruises | +93% | +6% | 886 |
| Royal Caribbean | +97% | None | 3,293 |
| Princess Cruises | +100% | +22% | 1,645 |
Every percentage on this page measures the same thing: what one guest pays on top of the per-person rate for two people sharing the same cabin.
The most direct way around the supplement is a cabin the line never intended to sell to two people. Norwegian has done this longest: its Studio cabins are compact single rooms with a full-size bed, priced for one guest, so there is no second fare to make up and no supplement to pay. Norwegian Epic introduced them in 2010 and still carries the most.
On the ships built around them, the studios sit in their own keycard-access corridor wrapped around a private Studio Lounge, with coffee, snacks and a bar that only solo guests can get into, plus a hosted get-together there every afternoon. It is the reason people who cruise alone keep going back to Norwegian: you meet the same faces on day one and have dinner company for the rest of the week, without any effort.
These ships currently sell studio cabins on sailings we track:
Norwegian is not the only option. TUI Cruises sells single cabins on Mein Schiff, and MSC, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Cunard and Holland America each keep a small block of single staterooms on some of their newer ships. The catch is how few there are: a big ship might have a dozen or two out of well over a thousand cabins, so they sell out early. Even without a solo cabin, nearly every line runs a solo travellers’ meet-up in the daily schedule for the first day or two. Nobody checks what cabin you booked.
A studio is a genuinely small room: around 100 square feet, no window on most ships, and a bathroom you have to squeeze into. It is a great deal, not a great cabin. And it is not always even the cheapest option.
On the sailings where we can price both, a standard two-person cabin booked for one comes out cheaper than the studio about one time in five. Usually it is an inside cabin, sometimes an ocean view, and the gap is normally small. But the studio can also be sold at 10% or more above a bigger room. The line prices the two separately, and the studio is the one that rarely gets discounted, because it always sells.
So it is worth pricing both every time. Once the supplement on a standard cabin drops under roughly 30%, having one to yourself starts to look like the better buy anyway: several times the floor space, room to leave a suitcase open for two weeks, a sofa, a real wardrobe, and on a balcony cabin your own outdoor seat to have breakfast on with nobody else’s schedule to work around. Spread over a week, that is worth more than the couple of hundred you saved.
It also removes the biggest constraint. There are only a handful of studios per ship, so they dictate which sailing, which date and which ship you end up on. Paying a small supplement on a normal cabin puts the entire catalogue back on the table, which is the whole point of filtering by supplement rather than by cabin type.
The best of the fleet: one sailing per ship, cheapest supplement first, nothing above +40%. That last rule is why some lines in the table above are missing here. A line can be worth knowing about without having a bargain on sale today. Updated daily.
Filter the full catalogue by maximum single supplement and sort by the smallest one. Live prices from the cruise lines, no booking fees.
Browse solo cruises