National Geographic has just announced the winners of its 2016 Travel Photographer of the Year Contest. The grand prize-winner, “Winter Horseman” won a seven-day polar bear safari for two at Churchill Wild-Seal River Heritage Lodge, a National Geographic Unique Lodge of the World. The winning photo, selected from thousands of entries, depicts a Mongolian horseman showing off his amazing riding skills.
The photograph was taken by Anthony Lau of Hong King after an early morning hike in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. “The snow was getting heavier, the wind was getting stronger, the morning snow was getting thinner and the light was moving away from its optimal position,” Lau told National Geographic. “I knew I only had a couple of shots to get the best out of this encounter. With a bit of luck, one of my final attempts managed to capture the moment when one of the riders charged out from the morning mist along with his horses.”
Solo travel is surging – and an industry still largely built for two is taking note.
Google reported in April 2026 that online searches involving “solo travel” hit an all-time high this year, with queries for “women solo travel” reaching a 15-year peak. Hilton’s 2026 trends report found that 26% of travelers planned to take a trip alone this year, and that nearly half said they planned to add solo days to the front or back of a family trip.
The issue isn’t new. In 1992, marketing researchers identified the solo consumer as an underserved market. But as tourism researchers have documented, the accommodation sector treats double occupancy as the default unit of consumption, which often slaps a “single supplement” charge on customers when they travel without a partner. The industry essentially penalizes travelers for arriving without a second body to fill the other half of a room they aren’t using.
The reason why so many hotels, cruise lines and tour operators still base prices on double occupancy is that their costs – the room, the berth, the coach seat, the guide – don’t fall by half when the second person fails to materialize. But the supplement isn’t just a pricing convention. It’s the clearest signal the industry sends about who it built the product for.
I’m a scholar who studies what I call the solo economy: how institutions and markets adapt, or fail to adapt, to the rise of single living. I’ve written before about how retail and restaurants still design for pairs.
Travel is further along than most in recognizing this cultural shift. It’s also a useful case because the industry has started on the easy part of the problem but barely touched the rest.
Demographics matter, but not the way you’d think
The broader shift toward solo living is real. In 2025, 39.7 million Americans lived alone. That’s 29% of all households, up from 20% in 1975. Married couples, meanwhile, fell to 47% of households from 66% 50 years earlier.
Those numbers alone don’t explain solo travel. Some of that decline went to people living alone; some went to unmarried couples, who are still a party of two on a booking page. Married people take trips alone. Single people travel with friends, siblings and parents, and plenty of them have logged serious hours as an extra wheel. Living alone and vacationing alone are different behaviors with different causes.
What connects them is the erosion of a single assumption: that every adult arrives with a plus-one. That assumption is weakening at home, and it’s now encountering the booking page.
Price is the easy rung
One response by the travel industry has been to shave the single supplement. For example, the tour operator Tauck announced this year that it’s waiving the single supplement on a class of its riverboat cabins across more than 250 European river cruise departures and reducing it by up to US$600 on 105 land departures.
Another touring company has taken a more committed approach to adjusting its offerings: Aurora Expeditions sets aside 10 dedicated solo cabins on every sailing across its three ships, with no single supplement, through its 2026 and 2027 seasons.
Then there’s Norwegian Cruise Line, which was early to the shift. In 2010, it introduced Studio staterooms aboard Norwegian Epic: Small cabins designed for one passenger, sold at single-occupancy prices and arranged around a keycard-access Studio Lounge reserved for solo travelers. The trade-off is less private space, but at a price for one, with access to a room full of fellow travelers going it alone.
Norwegian then expanded solo categories in 2024 from nine ships to its full 19-ship fleet. But on ships without Studios, much of the expansion was relabeling. Cruise Critic reported that standard double-occupancy rooms would likely be reclassified rather than retrofitted. And by Norwegian’s own account, the Studio Lounge is reserved for guests in Solo Studios – so the fleetwide solo categories come with the discount but not the room full of other solo travelers.
That’s the difference between repricing and redesigning. The 2010 Studio was a purpose-built 100-square-foot (9 square-meter) cabin that cost Norwegian something to construct. The 2024 categories are, in many cases, the same rooms as before, with a new label and a discount. The solo traveler pays less than two people would, but it’s still more than half for a room sized and built for two. A cabin sold to one occupies the same space as a cabin sold to two, and the industry still counts berths.
There’s a cleaner approach. Yotel sells a room type it calls Solo – 114 square feet (about 10 square meters) in New York City, maximum occupancy one, at the bottom of its price range. Nothing was subtracted to make it. It was built at that size, for that guest, and priced accordingly. That’s what designing for one looks like, and it’s rare enough that a tiny room counts as progress.
Many solo travelers seek control over their experiences and schedules, but they still seek a social component. Keriliwi on Unsplash
Traveling alone doesn’t mean being alone
A common mistake in designing for solo travelers is assuming that solitude is the product. It isn’t.
In the same 2026 data showing record interest in solo travel, Google found that searches for “travel groups” and “tour groups” also hit record highs. A Mastercard survey of more than 15,000 consumers across 11 countries found that 39% of international travelers had already taken a trip alone — and 7 in 10 international leisure travelers were interested in solo experiences built to connect them with like-minded people.
The contradiction makes sense when you acknowledge that privacy and isolation are two different things. A person can want total control over where to go, when to eat and when to return to the room – and still want company at dinner.
The issue with double-occupancy pricing is that it assumes the customer brings their own company. But when only one person books, the operator has to address the pricing problem – whether or how to discount; and a product problem – how to supply a social component. Waiving a solo supplement solves the first issue, but it ignores the second. Norwegian understood this in 2010 by creating its lounge for solo travelers.
The pitch is easier when the product is for one
For all these changes, travel advertising often still runs on couples: two glasses of wine, two lounge chairs, two silhouettes against a sunset. Sandals Resorts built an entire resort category around the premise.
When solo travel does appear, it gets a different script. The traveler is adventurous, on a journey of self-discovery. AARP’s current solo-travel guide emphasizes personal growth and self-reliance. Even Norwegian closes its solo pitch by reassuring the reader that “you’re pretty good company.”
The effect is to mark solo travel as exceptional at precisely the moment it stops being exceptional. Nobody reassures a couple that they will enjoy the balcony. Calling a solo traveler “brave” can be a compliment, but it can also reveal the assumption that traveling alone is abnormal, even when that’s changing.
That all said, parts of the tourism industry have taken big steps over the past 15 years. But treating solo travelers as an audience rather than an accommodation is harder. It’s about selling them what they have already said they want: control over the trip, and access to other people, on their own terms.
Marketing researchers named this opportunity in 1992. Thirty-four years later, the industry is still learning to build for one. Meanwhile, the solo traveler is standing at reception, holding a credit card, waiting for someone to design a room.
Photo credit: NASA – Gene Roddenberry, second from right, and Star Trek cast members visit the Space Shuttle Enterprise in 1976 with NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher, left. NASA
“Star Trek” is also unusual for its close connections to NASA, both in its storylines and in the real world. Decades of “Star Trek” adventures have ignited a love of spaceflight across generations, inspiring many who now work as space professionals.
I’m a cultural anthropologist who studies why people work in space exploration. I’ve interviewed astronomers, engineers, flight surgeons and astronauts. Although I focus more on science fact than science fiction, I’ve noticed in my interviews how much the two threads intertwine.
Because of this, I found myself at a “Star Trek” convention in early August 2026, just ahead of the show’s 60th anniversary on Sept. 8. The convention participants included people of widely different ages, appearances and identities. I was struck by just how much those gathered reflected the series’ values.
When NASA met Star Trek
In the original series, the show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, came up with a philosophy held by the Vulcan people. He called it IDIC: infinite diversity in infinite combinations. It suggests that an ideal society is made up of many different types, all working together.
It represented Roddenberry’s rejection of conformity. It also explained why the Enterprise crew included a Russian alongside Americans, and Black, Japanese and female characters all in positions of responsibility and authority. While many ordinary viewers absorbed “Star Trek’s” lessons of camaraderie and acceptance, those involved in real space exploration also took notice.
The cast of ‘Star Trek: The Original Series’ included a diverse crew of characters. Walters Art Museum
Roddenberry established relationships with NASA personnel in the early days of his series. NASA provided photographs of planetary bodies and advice about the realities of spaceflight, as well as stock footage and access to certain NASA facilities.
Leonard Nimoy, who played the popular character Mr. Spock, was even brought to the National Space Club’s Goddard Memorial Dinner in 1967 as a special guest. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave the keynote speech. Afterward, though, it was Nimoy, not Humphrey, who found himself surrounded by the club’s members, including NASA employees, aerospace engineers, members of the military and government officials, all eager to meet the actor portraying the starship Enterprise’s first officer.
The relationship between NASA and “Star Trek” benefited the show by legitimizing the series. It also helped NASA by publicizing its work and depicting a positive future where its efforts to land on the Moon would eventually lead to visits to distant worlds – and amazing scientific advances like the show’s transporter and warp drive.
In 1977, actress Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed communications officer Uhura, was hired to recruit for NASA. The space agency had expanded its pool of astronauts to include scientists and other “mission specialists.” For the first time, an astronaut no longer needed to be a pilot to participate in a space mission.
NASA selected its first Black astronaut candidates and its first female astronaut candidates in 1978. While this move toward inclusivity may not have been directly influenced by infinite diversity in infinite combinations, it was compatible with it. “Star Trek” inspired many of NASA’s future employees. In interviews for my book “The Ultraview Effect,” a quarter of the space professionals I spoke with mentioned “Star Trek” as an influence.
Nichelle Nichols sits in the space shuttle simulator at the Johnson Space Center in March 1977. NASA
An Apollo astronaut I interviewed, for instance, said he believed humans would eventually “be able to go anywhere in the universe, just like ‘Star Trek.’”
A young engineer who had grown up in the 1990s told me his motivation came from the “opening line of ‘Star Trek’… to explore strange new worlds.”
A space shuttle mission specialist emphasized Roddenberry’s decision to make the starship crew multicultural, explaining: “Today I look at the diversity of it … he was setting the stage back when it wasn’t acceptable [in order] to be acceptable!”
A changing future
That influence has accompanied a changing astronaut corps.
Both the 2025 astronaut class, which for the first time included more women than men, and the crew of Artemis II, which sent the first woman, first Black astronaut and first Canadian on a lunar mission, resemble the future that “Star Trek” imagined.
The “Star Trek” fans at the convention I attended were even more diverse. It was clear to me that Roddenberry’s “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” isn’t just a concept from the series, but something that has become a defining value of contemporary Trek fandom.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured a region of the galaxy that looks a little like the USS Enterprise, which NASA highlighted in a news release in 2016. NASA/JPL-Caltech
One such fan, Bjo Trimble, holds special status. She is credited with “saving ‘Star Trek’” when the series was almost canceled in 1968 after two seasons. Wearing a rainbow “IDIC” pin, she signed autographs at the SyFy Sistas booth, where T-shirts featuring Black “Star Trek” icons such as Uhura and Benjamin Sisko were on display.
However, with the Trump administration’s recent orders to dismantle all of NASA’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs and policies, institutional support for “Star Trek’s” vision of acceptance and inclusivity, which flourishes in its fan base, is being undone. This rollback occurred just as NASA’s crews were reaching new milestones in representing the diverse future that “Star Trek” has encouraged for decades.
Sixty years later, some of the diverse future that “Star Trek” imagined has become part of everyday spaceflight. Other parts of that ideal remain unfinished.
Should the U.S. follow these other countries and broadly eliminate the ability to write checks?
Years ago, experts predicted that checks would have disappeared by now. However, they are still around, and billions are written each year in the United States.
Why? The quick answer is that businesses love them. And plenty of Americans still use checks for good reasons. But there is more to the story.
I am a business school professor and one of the few academics who advocates for the use of cash. While I have long told everyone about the benefits of paper money, I didn’t give paper checks much thought or use them until my mother’s recent death. Then I found myself writing checks to the cemetery, funeral home, gravestone engraver and a host of other places. Plus, I started getting refund checks back from her landlord and insurance companies.
These experiences made me look more deeply into this form of payment to understand what was happening.
Fewer checks for bigger bucks
Every three years the U.S. government runs the Federal Reserve Payments Study by asking banks and credit unions for internal information. This survey tracks everything from how often credit cards are used to the number of checks written.
While check usage has sharply declined in the U.S., a significant number – about 9.2 billion in 2024 – are still written, the data shows. The face value of those checks is probably bigger than you’d expect: more than US$24 trillion, not adjusted for inflation. That is almost as large as U.S. gross domestic product of $29 trillion that year.
Not everyone can imagine numbers in billions or trillions, so let’s put those figures in more manageable terms.
A little over 150 checks were written per person in 2000. By 2024, the average had plummeted to 27 checks – slightly more than two per month. However, over that time, the amounts typically scribbled or printed on the face of those checks rose.
In 2000, the typical check was worth less than $1,000. By 2024, the average amount had more than doubled to $2,600.
And in both of those countries, check usage has fallen more sharply than in the United States.
Who uses checks today?
While check payments have declined, there are still two big groups of check writers in the United States.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta runs the Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice. This survey asks people, rather than banks, for information on their payment habits. Roughly one-third of all respondents stated they used a paper check in the past 30 days.
Not surprisingly, the answers vary by age. About 60% of people 65 and over say they wrote a check. Among those 18 to 24, under 6% said they did.
It also turns out that a lot of people who think they never write checks actually unknowingly do it all the time. If you pay your bills online, your bank tries to pay them electronically. If it cannot electronically make the payment, the bank cuts a paper check on your behalf. Any online bill payment taking more than a couple of business days to post is being sent by check.
Another important factor is that small businesses love checks. Over 80% of businesses with sales between $1 and $10 million make payments using checks. Why? Small businesses often require two signatures on a check. The need for signatures means owners have to sign their name before any money goes out the door. This gives them control over money and a clear idea who is getting paid and how much.
Small businesses also like receiving checks. I wrote a lot of checks after my mother’s death because many of those small businesses I dealt with wanted an extra 3% and sometimes more to cover the cost to them of a credit card payment. Writing paper checks saved me and the businesses a lot of money.
The future
While many Americans still write checks, their declining usage clearly underscores that they are not ideal for making payments in all situations.
One of the biggest problems with checks is that you never know if the check writer has sufficient funds to cover the amount. When an account doesn’t have enough money, the check bounces. The Federal Reserve, which clears about one-third of all U.S. checks, returned about 22 million checks, with a total face value of around $80 billion. While these numbers are large, over 99% of all checks written don’t bounce.
Another problem with checks is forgery. Thieves steal checks from mailboxes, alter information and then cash them. The most recent figures show about 500,000 annual cases of check fraud in the U.S. Again, while a half-million is large, it is a tiny fraction of the 9.2 billion checks written annually.
The unit, which costs about $100 million a year to run, turned a $6.6 million profit in 2024. But its machines need replacing, and the Federal Reserve is wavering on spending the money.
For me, the answer is a clear no. While checks are clearly less important today than in the past, the numbers show that the American people and businesses still use and need checks.
