Instead of booking your cruise through an agency and sailing with strangers, you may informally organize your friends to cruise together, with everyone making their own arrangements --- through a travel agent or directly with the cruise line. You can probably save money by booking as a group.
Appoint yourself the group's organizer, serving as point person for dealing with the cruise line, making the reservation and collecting deposits, getting cabin assignments, and seeing that final payments are remitted. You may score a free cruise for yourself. Some cruise lines throw in one free cruise for groups of 16 people who purchase eight cabins. Any cabinmate of yours would still have to pay, or you'd be charged the usual single supplement to have the cabin to yourself, and also be responsible for port taxes, gratuities and any other fees.
You could also divvy up the money saved on your free cruise among the whole group to lower everyone's fare a bit.
Single cruisers often have to pay 150 to 200 percent of the per-person fare to have a cabin to themselves. Cruise lines levy this fee to recoup the income lost from having one person in a two-person cabin. Most of today's cruise ships have no single cabins.
You can avoid the single supplement a few ways: travel with a friend and share a cabin, or book a singles cruise through an agency and let them match you with a cabinmate. Visit the agency's online message board, if they have one, to find someone you can share a cabin with. CruiseCritic.com, one of the leading cruise information sites with five million visitors, has dozens of such boards, created by passengers, for any cruise where people are looking to share cabins.
Cruise lines will sometimes match you to a non-smoking single of the same sex, although this service is dying. But ask when you book. If your cabinmate fails to show up on sailing day for any reason, you get the cabin to yourself for no extra charge.
Crystal Cruise Line is an upscale line that's particularly single-friendly, although it has no single cabins,. According to Cruisemates.com, 10 to 15 percent of the passengers on each Crystal cruise are single. Crystal occasionally reduces the single supplement, and hosts many special onboard events for singles, and even provides gentlemen as dance partners for unescorted women.
