22 May 2026

Why Women Pay More to Travel

Key stat

84%

of solo travellers worldwide are women. The products and prices that meet them have not caught up.

Reading mode

Full essay

Travel is sold as something universal. In practice it is priced, designed, and informed for one kind of traveller. The rest pay to bridge the gap, and most of the people doing that bridging are women.

Women now make up 84% of all solo travellers globally^[1] and drive 82% of overall travel decisions^[2]. The products and prices that meet them have not caught up. Here is what they end up paying for.

The single supplement

A "supplement" is an extra fee hotels and tour operators charge solo travellers. Their rooms are priced for two people, so if you show up alone, you pay for the empty bed too.

Hotels, cruise lines, and tour operators base their pricing on two people sharing a room. A solo traveller, no matter how much physical space they actually use, is charged a single supplement: an additional fee on top of the per-person price, typically 25% to 100% of the base trip, sometimes higher on cruises^[3].

What the supplement actually costs^[3]

Set a trip below. The figure shows what the same room would cost a couple versus a solo traveller, after the supplement is added.

Nights7 nights

Hotel rate per night$200

Supplement fee50% of room rate

Couple, two travellers

$1,540

Each person pays: $770

Solo traveller

$2,240

Of which, supplement fee: +$700

What being alone costs you here

You are sleeping in the same room, the same week, the same hotel. You pay $1,470 more than each person in the couple paid.

+191%

Premium

The mechanism is simple. The room is priced as if two people will be in it. If only one shows up, that empty bed becomes the solo traveller's bill.

78% of women identify the single supplement as the single biggest obstacle to solo travel^[4]. Women are 84% of the solo travel market, which means the single supplement is, in practice, a tax on women travelling alone.

A solo traveller can pay anywhere from 1.25 to 2 times the per-person price listed in a brochure, depending on the operator.

A growing number of women-focused tour operators have eliminated the supplement entirely^[5]. The big platforms have not.

The planning premium

Women spend more hours per trip researching where to go, where to stay, and how to stay safe. That research is unpaid labour. It is also work the platforms should be doing.

Pricing is the easy part to count. Time is harder, but it shows up in the data.

Hours spent planning an international trip^[6]

0h6h12h18h24h

Women

12 hrs

Men

9.4 hrs

That is a 28% planning premium, on average. The additional time goes into research that the products should be doing: verifying which neighbourhoods are safe, which transport options are reliable after dark, which accommodations have working locks, which countries have legal protections that match the marketing.

Information work has a cost even when it is unpaid. Twelve hours of planning per trip, across hundreds of millions of trips, is a structural transfer of labour from the platforms to the customer.

The safety premium

Beyond planning time, women spend more money on the actual trip. Safer neighbourhoods, taxis over public transport, stronger insurance, women-only floors. None of it shows up as a single line item.

Once the planning is done, the actual trip costs more.

A woman travelling alone tends to choose accommodation in safer neighbourhoods, even if it is more expensive. She tends to choose taxis or ride-hails over public transport at night. She pays for women-only floors, for hostels with female-only dorms, for higher-end hotels in countries where reception staff might otherwise be a problem. She buys travel insurance with stronger coverage. She sometimes buys a second flight to avoid arriving at an airport after midnight.

Destinations restricted by safety concerns^[7]

96 hypothetical destinations

62 restricted · 34 open

65%

65% of women cite personal safety as the reason they avoid solo travel or restrict the destinations they will consider.

The safety premium is not a single line item. It is dozens of small upgrades a woman makes, often without noticing, to convert the trip the product sold her into the trip she can actually take.

The information gap

The deepest cost is informational. The content women need is scattered across Facebook groups and DMs. The major platforms have not built for it.

The deeper cost behind both the planning premium and the safety premium is informational. Most travel content for women is built around safety as restriction. Where you should not go. What you should not do. What to wear. What to fear. The conversation has, over time, reduced women's travel to a problem of avoidance.

That is not what women are asking for.

Women are asking where to go, what other women have done when they got there, and what worked.

Who travel products are designed for

Women aloneMuslimLGBTQ+OlderAccessibilityWrong passport

Centre

Default traveller

White, able-bodied, Western man with a passport read as low-risk. Priced as the assumed user.

Outside

Everyone else

Women, people of Muslim faith, queer travellers, older travellers, travellers with disabilities, travellers with passports read with suspicion at the wrong borders.

Why the platforms haven't moved

Booking, Expedia, and Airbnb run the most digital travel transactions on earth. They have not fixed any of this. Here is why.

There are three companies that handle most online travel bookings on the planet. Booking Holdings did $23.7 billion in revenue in 2024^[8]. Expedia did $13.7 billion^[9]. Airbnb runs at about $11 billion annually^[10]. Booking and Expedia together process over half of all global digital travel transactions^[11]. Booking.com alone takes 71% of European online hotel bookings^[12].

These are not small companies that lack resources. If serving women travelling alone were a priority, the resources to do it exist many times over.

The reason it hasn't happened is not a resource problem. It is a structural one.

A platform with this kind of consolidation optimises for the median user. That is what wins the algorithm. Booking.com's search box asks for destination, dates, and guests. The filters expand outwards from that base: price, star rating, location, amenities, refundability. Each filter that gets added has to clear the bar of "useful to enough people to justify the engineering and UX cost." The information a woman travelling alone needs, was the reception staff respectful, did the cab drivers cluster outside the hotel late at night, is the area walkable after dark, do other solo women say the lock on the door actually works, does not fit into a structured filter the platform can monetise across millions of properties.

The supplement itself is not theirs to remove. Hotels and tour operators set it. The platforms pass it through and collect commission on the larger total. They have no incentive to surface "operators who do not charge a single supplement" as a primary filter, because that filter would shrink the inventory that performs best for them.

Their reviews are structured for the median traveller too. Anonymous one-to-five scores aggregated across users with no shared context. A score of 4.2 means something different to a 26-year-old woman travelling alone than it does to a couple in their fifties on a planned itinerary. The platform cannot disaggregate signal it never collected.

Building real community is the harder problem. Community that actually gets used, that women trust enough to post questions in, share which neighbourhoods worked, flag operators who behaved badly, is expensive to build, slow to grow, and hard to measure on the metrics that drive quarterly earnings. Public companies operating at hundreds of billions in transaction volume cannot afford to bet roadmap time on slow community work for a segment they treat as a tail.

This is what path dependence looks like. These companies were built before AI made personalised content cheap, before the shift to direct-to-consumer trust networks, before the segments they treat as niches grew into hundreds of billions of dollars on their own. Their architecture is correct for the world they built it in. It is wrong for the world we have now.

Why now is the moment

Three shifts in the last five years changed what is possible. Specialised, identity-aware travel products that would have been impossible to build in 2015 are now cheaper than generic ones.

Three things changed in the last five years that did not change in the twenty before them.

The first is that the technology to serve specific travellers became cheap. Building a personalised, gender-aware, safety-informed travel guide for one segment used to require either a content team at Lonely Planet scale or an army of moderators on a community platform. Generative models compress that cost by orders of magnitude. A small team can now produce destination content, safety briefings, neighbourhood breakdowns, and itinerary suggestions for a specific kind of traveller, in their voice, at quality the dominant platforms used to need years and millions to match^[13].

The second is that distribution moved. Booking.com built its position partly on Google paid acquisition and partly on review-site SEO when those were the rails. Today, travellers find places through TikTok, Instagram, Substack, podcasts, niche forums, and creator-led communities. Reaching a specific kind of traveller no longer requires being the biggest spender on Google Ads. It requires being the trusted voice in the place that kind of traveller already spends time. The unit economics that protected the incumbents have flipped.

The third is that trust shifted. Generic anonymous reviews are now widely understood to be gameable, padded, and stripped of the context that would make them useful to a specific reader. People are increasingly comfortable trusting recommendations from people who travel the way they do, who share gender, faith, mobility, identity, or some other specific shared frame, over higher-volume but lower-fidelity sources. The major platforms cannot pivot to gendered or identity-aware recommendation infrastructure without rebuilding their content model from the ground up.

These three shifts created a window. Specialised, identity-aware, community-anchored travel products that would have been impossible to build at viable cost in 2015 are now cheaper to build than the equivalent generic feature set was in 2015. The default platform stopped being the only option.

This is not a prediction. Layla, Mindtrip, Hopper, Kayak's ChatGPT integration, and a long tail of specialist AI-native travel apps are already in market^[13]. The travellers who don't fit the default profile are voting with their attention. The question is which of the new entrants will earn the trust to become the platform those travellers actually use.

What needs to change

The fix is not adding a women's tab to an existing app. It is building products from the user back, not from the inventory forward. Five principles.

The shift is not about adding a women's tab to an existing app. It is about building products from the user back, not from the inventory forward.

Five things follow from that:

Information architecture, redesigned for safety. The product surface should answer the questions a woman travelling alone actually asks before booking, not after. Where the property is on a walkable-after-dark grid. Whether reception is staffed by women. Whether the operator has a track record with solo female guests. Whether the surrounding neighbourhood has police presence that matches the marketing.

Pricing surfaced honestly. Operators that do not charge a single supplement should be searchable as a primary filter, not buried as a footnote. Operators that do should be transparent about why and how much. The current default of "show me the cheapest rate" hides the supplement until checkout, by which point the comparison cost has been paid.

Reviews that carry the reader's frame. Reviews from travellers who share the user's frame should be weighted higher than the anonymous aggregate. A woman should see what other women said about a property first, not what the algorithm thinks is most relevant to the median user.

Community that earns trust before it asks for money. Real groups of travellers who share context, who can answer questions in DMs, who flag operators that misbehave. Real moderation. No pay-to-promote. Products that try to monetise this layer before earning it will fail.

Operator selection, opinionated. Not every property and not every operator. A curated inventory aligned with the values the product claims to hold. Saying no to inventory that does not meet the bar is a feature of the product, not a bug.

These are not Sola's principles only. They are the principles any product that takes the underserved seriously will have to commit to. The platforms that built for the median user cannot retrofit these. The products that get built next from these principles can.

Sola is the first

Sola is the first product I am building under this thesis. It will not be the last.

Sola is the first product I am building under that thesis. It is a travel app for women travelling solo. The people who use it are women who got tired of doing the platform's work for it. The information is by women, generated from real conversations. The operators surfaced are vetted. The reviews are weighted toward people who travel the way the user does. The community is private, intentional, and trusted before it is asked for anything.

It will not be the only product. The default platforms have not been built for many of the travellers I have been talking to, not just women. Sola is the first product under a longer thesis: the people the major travel platforms missed are not edge cases. They are most of the market.

The bill they have been quietly paying does not need to keep coming.

Sources

← Back to writing