👉 Travelling alone is no longer a fallback: for many travellers, it’s the best way to enjoy a holiday.
📘 What is a Solocation?
A solocation is a travel trend in which a guest deliberately chooses to holiday alone, without a partner, family or group of friends. The term blends “solo” and “vacation”, reflecting a shift in mindset: travelling alone is no longer associated only with business trips or a lack of company, but with a conscious choice of disconnection, self-discovery or itinerary freedom.
Key features:
- The solo traveller profile ranges from younger guests seeking flexible experiences to senior or professional guests looking to switch off without depending on anyone else’s schedule.
- It typically drives specific demand for single rooms or doubles for single use, along with services designed for the solo guest (communal dining tables, group activities that encourage socialising, coworking or lounge-style common areas).
- Many hotels have started designing rates and packages specifically for the solo traveller, moving away from the traditional “single supplement” that penalises guests travelling without a companion.
- It’s linked to growing interest in wellness experiences, digital detox, retreats and activities that make it easy to socialise without needing to arrive with company.
- It has its own distribution and marketing angle, as the solo traveller searches for information and books differently to someone travelling as a couple or in a group.
For Revenue Management, the solocation trend means rethinking both room-type pricing and demand segmentation, factoring in a guest profile with different needs and price sensitivity to a couple’s or family’s booking.
✅ Why does the Solocation matter?
- It opens up a new demand segment that can fill single or double rooms outside the traditional couple or family booking pattern.
- It helps monetise room types (singles, doubles for single use) that sometimes sit underused.
- It forces a review of pricing policies such as the single supplement, which can be holding back demand from this traveller profile.
- It drives the creation of specific packages and experiences (wellness, social activities, retreats) that improve RevPOR without relying on couple or group accommodation.
- It brings in a guest profile with different booking and length-of-stay patterns, useful for diversifying the forecast and easing dependence on a single type of segment.
- It strengthens the hotel’s positioning with a growing, loyalty-worthy audience that particularly values experience and personalised service.
💡 Practical example
An urban boutique hotel spots, through its booking data, a steady rise in guests booking a single room for weekend stays. The Revenue Manager, working with Marketing, removes the single supplement on selected low-demand dates and launches a “Solocation” package including a solo spa experience, a communal-table dinner to encourage socialising, and access to a coworking space in the lobby.
The result: the hotel captures a new segment of solo travellers on dates that previously relied almost entirely on couples’ demand, improving occupancy of single rooms and generating extra revenue through the bundled package.
🔄 Disambiguation
- Solocation vs Bleisure: Bleisure combines business travel with leisure, usually by extending a work trip; a solocation is purely a leisure stay, defined by travelling without a companion rather than by the purpose of the trip.
- Solocation vs Staycation: A staycation is defined by geographic proximity (staying close to home); a solocation is defined by travelling without company, regardless of the distance to the destination.
- Solocation vs Single Supplement: The single supplement is a rate surcharge applied to a guest occupying alone a room designed for two; the solocation is the travel trend itself, and many hotels are rethinking the single supplement precisely to avoid penalising this segment.
- Solocation vs Demand Segmentation: Demand segmentation is the general classification of a hotel’s guests by different criteria (purpose of travel, channel, origin); the solocation is one specific segment that can be identified within that broader segmentation.
In summary: the solocation turns the solo traveller into a demand segment in its own right, pushing hotels to rethink pricing, room typology and experience offerings to attract and retain a guest profile that’s increasingly willing to travel without company.
