Climbing Toubkal on your own, and why there is no single supplement
Most of the people who write to me are travelling alone, and the first question is almost never about the mountain. It is about what it costs to be one person on a trip priced for two, and whether Friday night is going to be six friends and you. There is no single supplement on this trip, and the reason is structural rather than kind. Here is what a solo booking actually looks like, hour by hour and euro by euro.
AREMD 1,900 M
WHAT A SINGLE SUPPLEMENT ACTUALLY IS
A single supplement is not a penalty, whatever it feels like when you find it on a booking page. It is arithmetic. Most trips are costed on double rooms, because a room is what hotels and guesthouses sell — a room, not a bed. Two people in a twin, one price. One person in the same twin and the operator is still paying for the whole twin, so the missing half lands on you. Then comes the awkward alternative, which is the share-with-a-stranger box. Tick it and you are gambling on somebody you have not met, and if no match turns up, the supplement usually comes back anyway, at the point where your flights are already booked and you have stopped shopping around. I have read a lot of those terms pages. Most of them are not dishonest. They are just built on accommodation sold in pairs, and the person travelling alone is the one who pays for the geometry. Which is worth understanding before I tell you why ours does not have one, because the answer is not that I am nicer than anybody else. It is that this particular trip is not made of double rooms.
WHY THIS TRIP CANNOT HAVE ONE
Three days, two nights, and neither night is a hotel room. Saturday is the Refuge des Mouflons at 3,207 m: dorm bunks, blankets, a shared table, no shower, and roughly forty people in the building on a normal weekend. There is no single occupancy to sell you up there. Nobody has one. Hassan does not have one. Friday is a family gite in Aremd at 1,900 m, an Amazigh working village above Imlil with walnut terraces below it — somebody's actual house, with rooms of different shapes. We book the house, not a grid of twins. So when I sat down to price this trip, the supplement had nowhere to attach. There was no empty half of a double to bill, so nobody gets billed for it. That is the whole explanation, and I would rather give you the boring structural reason than dress a zero up as generosity. I am not going to put a number on what everybody else charges, because what I have is a handful of booking pages read on my own screen rather than a survey worth quoting — the ones I looked at priced the solo case somehow, and that is as far as I can honestly take it. Ours is EUR 350 whether you arrive as one, two or six.
MOST ENQUIRIES COME FROM ONE PERSON
I answer every enquiry myself — by email, usually within four hours — and the majority arrive from somebody travelling alone. Sometimes it is a first big trip on their own. Sometimes it is a person whose walking partner pulled out six weeks ago and who has decided to come anyway. Often it is somebody who found the mountains in adulthood rather than childhood, which is my own story: I grew up in Belgium, I came to this late, and my first attempt at this summit was a December ascent I turned back from short of the top. I went back two months later and stood on it. The only thing that had changed was preparation. There was no travel companion anywhere in that story. So a solo booking is not an exception I make room for. It is the default the trip was designed around, and it changes small things that matter more than they sound: the group chat that opens before you fly, the shape of the table on Friday night, the fact that the briefing is delivered out loud to everybody rather than muttered to whoever brought a friend.
SEVEN DAYS BEFORE · THE GROUP CHAT
A week before departure I open a WhatsApp group and put the whole group in it. For anyone travelling alone this is the single most useful thing I do, and it costs nothing. By the time you land at Marrakech you know how many of you there are, roughly where everybody is coming from, who is driving up rather than flying, and which questions have already been asked twice. Kit questions get answered in front of everybody, which means the person too shy to ask gets the answer anyway — that is most of what the chat is for. Flight times get compared and people share transfers. I post the meeting point, the forecast as it firms up, and a plain sentence about what the summit is likely to be at sunrise that weekend, so nobody packs for the wrong mountain. If you would rather not be in a group chat, say so and you get the same information from me one to one, no explanation needed. Some people want the names in advance. Some would rather arrive as a stranger and stay one until dinner. Both are fine. The point is that you choose which, instead of finding out at the trailhead.
FRIDAY · ARRIVING ALONE, HONESTLY
Atmosphere is the thing a trip page is least able to promise you, so here is the flat version. You meet in Marrakech in the afternoon, at 450 m, in the heat. Two hours in a vehicle, which is where most of the talking starts, because a minibus does that to people. Then a 45-minute walk up to Aremd — 160 metres of ascent, enough to get warm, not enough to hurt. You will probably be quiet for the first half of it and nobody will mind. At the gite there is a kit check, and this is the moment a solo booking stops feeling solo, because a kit check is a group activity whether you like it or not: eight headtorches on a table, boots being turned over and inspected, an argument about whether the second pair of gloves is really necessary. Yes, it is. Then dinner at one table, then the briefing, hour by hour, from the 04:30 headtorch start to being back in Marrakech at 17:30 on Sunday. I will not promise you friendship. I will promise that you do not eat alone on Friday and you do not go to bed without knowing exactly what happens next, which is most of what people arriving on their own are actually worried about.
WHY THE CAP IS EIGHT
Eight is not a round marketing number. It is the size at which a stranger becomes a name by lunch on Saturday. Four is nearly a private trip, with nowhere to put a bad mood. Twenty is a coach party, and on a mountain a coach party means a pace nobody in it chose. Eight fits round one table, walks in one line, and divides cleanly when it needs to — which is the point on Sunday, when we run one certified guide to every four walkers. My own estimate — from this trail, not from a figure anybody publishes — is that roughly half the people who attempt Toubkal do not summit on a first attempt, and in my experience it is almost never fitness. It is an unsynchronised group, a schedule with no margin, and a pace set by whoever is quickest. If you turn out to be the slowest person on the hill that morning, the group walks at your pace, or it splits and the second guide stays with you. Nobody is left behind and nobody is quietly resented for it. That is straightforward to run with eight and impossible to run with twenty, and it is why the number is what it is rather than what would be more profitable.
THE GROUP IS USUALLY MIXED
We run Friday to Sunday because that is when Moroccans climb. Toubkal is a weekend mountain for people in Casablanca and Marrakech in a way it is not for people flying in from Europe, and that is the mix I am booking for October: visitors and Moroccan climbers on the same trail behind the same guide. If you are booking alone, that mix works in your favour rather than against it. You are not the one outsider attached to a group of six who have been planning this together since university. In a mixed group everybody is doing some version of what you are doing — turning up, finding out, walking. Hassan was born in the Aït Mizane valley and has been guiding since 2012, and he moves between four languages all day without making a performance of it. Two things I ask of everyone, and I mean them: ask before you photograph people, and cover shoulders and knees in the villages. Buy your tea from the small places. You are walking through somebody's working life on the way up, not through scenery, and the valley notices which visitors understood that.
A DOOR AT NIGHT, IF YOU WANT ONE
Some people want company by day and a door they can close at night. That is not antisocial, it is just how some of us recover. So the private room in the valley gite is there at no extra cost, subject to what the house has that particular weekend — you ask for it, we allocate it, nothing is added to the EUR 350. I would rather the room went to the person who needs it than to the person willing to pay for it. But be clear about the limit, because this is the sentence I repeat in almost every enquiry: solo does not mean single occupancy at the refuge, because nothing at the refuge is single occupancy. Saturday night at 3,207 m is a bunk in a dorm, a blanket, the sleeping bag we provide, no shower, and other people breathing loudly in thin air. If that is genuinely a dealbreaker, tell me at the enquiry stage and I will tell you plainly that this is not your trip, because there is no version of Toubkal from that refuge with a private room in it.
WHAT BOOKING ALONE COSTS YOU
EUR 350 per person, EUR 120 to hold the place, the balance later. No supplement, no compulsory room-share, no upgrade you have to buy to avoid a stranger. The terms are written for people whose plans move, which solo travellers' plans do: date changes are free up to 45 days out, as often as you need them, and inside 45 days it is one change for EUR 40 if there is space. Cancel more than 30 days out and everything comes back except the deposit; 14 to 30 days, half; closer than that there is no refund, but the place transfers to anyone you name, which is the clause people booking alone use most. Insurance is required and I check it — it has to cover trekking to 4,200 m and helicopter evacuation. And the part I have to say out loud: our first departures are October 2026. No completed trips yet, no reviews, nothing to quote you from a happy customer, because there are no customers to quote. What exists is the route, the turnaround policy, and the fact that I answer the messages myself. Dates and the full day-by-day are on the Toubkal trip page, the itemised cost is on the price sheet, and the enquiry form comes straight to me. If you would rather just ask me whether coming alone is a bad idea, ask me.
NO SINGLE SUPPLEMENT ON ANY DEPARTURE · PRIVATE ROOM IN THE VALLEY GITE AT NO EXTRA COST · THE TOUBKAL REFUGE IS DORMS ONLY