PRICEWATCH DAILY:Travelling abroad can be a pricey business if you're alone or plan on using your phone to go online, finds CONOR POPE

Avoiding the single- traveller tax

- A reader contacted us last week to complain about the curse of the single supplement. She decided to book a holiday on her own this year, for reasons that she says are too complicated to go into.

“It is the first time I’ve travelled alone for a long time,” she writes, and she “was horrified by the amount of places which added a single supplement of up to €60 a night on to the bill just because I was going it alone.

“We have been told for months that tour operators all over the world are struggling to fill rooms, yet still many feel they can penalise single people in this fashion.”

She questions whether such a “discriminatory charge” is legal and asks if there is anything she can do to avoid it.

Many hotels and tour operators’ prices are based on a per-person sharing basis and the rates are not halved if selling to a single person.

Hotels and tour operators will point out that if they can get a couple to pay €200 a night for a room, they would be foolish to sell the same room to a single person for half that price.

It is not easy to circumvent it. The trick is to shop around. Some big tour operators, keen to capture the singles market, use their substantial buying power to negotiate lower single supplements, while some hoteliers waive single supplements off-peak and others just charge a flat rate for the room, irrespective of how many people are sleeping in it.

On some group tours, there is an option to share a room with another traveller to keep the cost down – although that might be a bit too extreme for many people – and some Irish companies offer holidays that come without surcharges.

Budget Travel has a list of locations in its brochures that don’t penalise people travelling alone. The company told Pricewatch that, in recent years, it had seen greater numbers of single people making bookings so it got some properties to waive supplements at certain times of the year.

But if the times or locations offered by a tour operator don’t suit, the best thing for anyone travelling alone might be to do the DIY thing: book flights and hotels online, and ignore the hotels that insist on supplements.

Daft data prices make roaming exorbitant

- Cormac Tobin was in Belfast recently and used his O2 phone to check the sports results – a lot of sports results by the sound of it, because it ended up costing him €90.

“I thought this was totally excessive but reckoned it was my own fault for not checking the price in advance.” So when he got home he rang O2 and asked them to disable data when he was roaming.

“O2 refused to do this. I could only disable roaming completely, but not data separately. I’d switch operators, but after looking into it, I discovered all the other companies have similar policies. I’m more likely now to go and buy a newspaper than consider using my phone to look up something,” he says.

Anything that makes people read newspapers is a good thing.

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