The Roommate Question: What Really Happens When You Share a Room as a Solo Female Traveler
By Paige Davis, AdventureWomen President
“Do I have to share a room with a stranger?”
“What if I don’t like my roommate?”
These are two of the most common questions we hear from women considering solo travel with AdventureWomen. I get it. I had the exact same worry earlier this year on a trip to India.
I didn’t know a single person going on that trip. I signed up solo and for a double room, and I had no idea who I’d end up with. A few weeks before departure, I got my answer: Kathy from Michigan. We’d never met. We were from different time zones, different generations, different just about everything. On paper, we had almost nothing in common except a shared itinerary.
Typically, AdventureWomen rotates roommates throughout a trip, so solo travelers get to know several different women in the group rather than just one. But on my India trip, Kathy and I were the only two women traveling solo who’d opted for a shared room — everyone else was either traveling with a friend or had booked a single room. So instead of rotating, Kathy and I were roommates for the full two weeks.
Kathy and I fell into an easy rhythm almost immediately. Most nights we’d each be lying in our own beds, scrolling through the news on our phones, laughing out loud and trading funny stories or memes before lights out. During the day, we each mixed and mingled with the rest of the group rather than sticking together — which actually made our evenings more interesting. “Oh, who did you talk to today?” became a nightly conversation.
Part of what made it work, honestly, is that Kathy and I are pretty different people. She’s a self-described “golden retriever” — eager to be included in everything, always up for whatever’s happening. I’m much more of an introvert who needs real downtime to recharge my battery. We figured out early on how to respect that about each other.
How Roommate Matching Actually Works
AdventureWomen has run small group tours for women for over four decades, and solo travelers make up a large share of our guests on every trip. If you’re traveling alone as a woman and choose a shared room, you’ll likely room with whoever else on that trip is also traveling solo. What transpires is a pattern I’ve seen play out again and again, on my own trip and others: women who show up solo for a small-group adventure trip tend to have a lot in common before they ever say a word to each other — curiosity, a taste for the unfamiliar, and the willingness to show up alone and trust the process. That shared starting point tends to do a lot of the work.
On most departures, roommates rotate partway at each hotel, so you get the chance to connect with more than one woman in your group rather than just whoever you happened to be paired with on day one. India was the exception, not the rule, and only because of how that particular group happened to book.
If you’d rather not share a room at all, that’s an option too — most trips offer a single supplement for solo travelers who prefer their own space, and we work to keep that cost as low as possible or waive it entirely on select departures.
It Won’t Be a Perfect Match Every Time
I won’t pretend every roommate pairing turns into a two-week friendship the way mine did. Some pairings are simply pleasant and low-key — two women who share a room, keep different schedules, and are perfectly happy to leave it at that. That’s a fine outcome too. The point of a shared room isn’t to guarantee a best friend; it’s to make solo female travel more affordable and less lonely, while you focus on the trip itself.
What I do think matters, whatever your personalities turn out to be, is being respectful of each other and the space. You’ve both paid a lot of money for this trip, and you both deserve to enjoy it.
The Bottom Line
If the roommate question is the thing standing between you and booking that trip you’ve been eyeing, here’s what I’d tell you: showing up solo is not the leap it feels like. On a women-only trip built around adventure travel for women, you’re not being handed off to a stranger and hoping for the best — you’re being placed alongside another woman who made the same brave, slightly nerve-wracking decision you did. Sometimes that turns into a two-week friendship, like mine and Kathy’s. Sometimes it’s simply easy and uneventful. Either way, you won’t be doing it alone.
