The solo supplement problem nobody talks about enough
If you have ever priced a trip alone, you already know the sting: hotels charge you for a second bed you will never use, group tours slot you into a schedule built for twelve, and the whole experience quietly signals that solo is somehow the wrong way to travel.
That friction is exactly what platforms like Baboo Travel are betting against. The B-Corp certified company, which connects travellers directly with vetted local destination experts, has built its entire model around what the industry is now calling the *solocation* — a solo trip designed from scratch around one person's actual interests, pace, and values, not a pre-packaged itinerary averaged out for a crowd.
What 'custom' actually means here
The specifics are worth sitting with. Baboo Travel claims that 87% of a traveller's budget stays within the local economy by cutting out the traditional middlemen between a tourist and the people who actually know a place. Every itinerary is built by local specialists rather than remote travel agents working off a catalogue. And the company offsets 110% of each trip's carbon footprint — meaning the journey is designed to be net-positive for the environment, not merely neutral.
There is also 24/7 on-the-ground concierge support, which matters more than it might sound. One of the quieter anxieties of solo travel — especially in an unfamiliar country — is the knowledge that if something goes sideways, you are handling it alone. Having a local team reachable at any hour changes that calculus considerably.
CEO Paul Sarfati frames it plainly: the modern independent traveller wants a journey built to personal rhythms and values, not a generic getaway with a solo surcharge tacked on.
Why this matters for a solo travel audience in India
India has a fast-growing cohort of solo travellers — particularly women, young professionals, and people in their thirties and forties reassessing what a holiday is actually for. The barriers they face are familiar: accommodation priced for couples, tours that move at the pace of the slowest group member, and a general industry assumption that travel is a group activity.
The solocation model — deeply customised, locally guided, and regeneratively designed — maps neatly onto what many Indian solo travellers already want but struggle to find in one package. The concept of keeping money within local economies also resonates here, where travellers are increasingly aware that their rupees (or dollars, on international trips) can either feed a global intermediary or sustain a local guide, chef, or homestay owner.
Baboo Travel currently operates with a focus on destinations through its Be Mexico and Be Peru DMC partnerships, so it is not yet a tool for planning a trip to Coorg or the Northeast. But the model it represents — local expertise, no middleman, genuine flexibility — is a useful benchmark for what solo travel infrastructure in India could look like, and a signal of where traveller expectations are heading globally.
The solocation is not a trend so much as a correction. And the sooner the travel industry catches up to it, the better.