Solo Cruises With a Low Single Supplement

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.

Solo supplement by cruise line

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.

How to read the supplement

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.

• Negative. A dedicated solo promo fare. You pay less on your own than each of two people sharing would.
• 0%. No single supplement. You pay exactly one person's share.
• 100%. The standard supplement, where you pay for the whole two-person cabin.
• Above 100%. Usually a sailing that is nearly sold out, where the last cabins are priced to discourage single occupancy.

Ships with cabins built for one

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.

The list below is counted straight out of the same data as the prices, grouped by line, with the number of sailings carrying each ship's solo cabin alongside. Refreshed daily, so a ship drops off when its last one departs:

Norwegian is not the only option. MSC has fitted solo cabins across much of its newer fleet and now sells them on about as many sailings, TUI Cruises sells them on Mein Schiff, and Virgin Voyages and Princess each keep a block on some ships. Royal Caribbean and Celebrity build them too, but neither has quoted us a one-guest price yet, which is why they are missing above. The catch everywhere 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.

Or keep a two-person cabin to yourself

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.

Where the cheap solo fares hide

• Shoulder season and repositioning. Supplements track demand. The same ship that wants 100% in August will take far less on a November transatlantic.
• Reduced-supplement promos. Lines run these in bursts on specific sailings rather than across the brand. A line's typical figure in the table above tells you where to start looking; it does not tell you what you'll pay, which is why every sailing is measured on its own.
• Book studios early, standard cabins late. The few solo cabins on a ship sell out well ahead, while the supplement on a normal cabin tends to soften as the line tries to fill the last of them.
• Check both currencies. The euro and dollar fares are set separately, and the supplement on the same sailing is not always the same in each.
• Only the fare doubles. Port taxes, service charges and drinks packages are per guest, so a solo pays them once. The gap between sailing alone and sharing is smaller than the headline percentage suggests.

Lowest single supplements right now

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.