Do I have to share a hotel room with my coworker?

I'm a woman in academe, in a career center, and I do not ever share a room with anyone at conferences. But I've had to fight for it, and there was some grumbling, to the point that I would pay out of pocket to not share a room. I really need my room for quiet time. When I worked in a center with a female director, I had to fight for it a little bit harder because there does seem to be a sense that 'women will share'. Since then I've worked for male directors, while I had to fight for it, usually not that hard. For me it got decided years ago, when I went to a conference with career counselors, and all the women shared rooms and none of the men did. That was it for me. Now, my assumption for my staff is that if they want to share, they can, but if they don't want to, they don't have to. It's an expensive perk not to have to, but it's one that all of my staff appreciate.

In the corporate world, I've never heard of people being asked to share rooms. I'm also a doctoral student and attend/present at conferences. My school offers students a stipend for travel, but not a full reimbursement. At academic conferences students on a per diem stipend often share rooms, but I have not observed that faculty are asked to do so. BTW, if you're bearing work costs out of your own pocket then ask your accountant if these could be deductions on your taxes.

I'm not an academic, but this is pretty common in the corporate world too. Companies want to save money; sharing a room is one way to do that. If you must have your own room, then spend the extra money to do so.

Is sharing rooms common for faculty? No, but it's not rare enough to be weird. Sharing a room with a stranger or bare acquaintance? Well into the land of the fucked up.

A lot of academics are ridiculous cheapskates. As a student, it was pretty much expected that you'd share. As a "grown up" I think you have every right to expect your own room.

I'm in the biological and computer sciences. Some conferences or departmental retreats are at remote locations and there are just a limited number of rooms. So the conference expects you to share. If you don't name a preferred roommate, you'll get a random stranger. Elsewhere faculty usually get their own room. But in the sciences they are also often the principal investigator on an external grant that's paying for the travel. Students and postdocs in the U.S. have to share, in my experience. You will see trainees send emails to conference mailing lists looking for a roommate. When I was in the UK there was much less of a culture of sharing rooms with other people than the U.S. across the board. People were horrified when I told them that I shared a room with someone as a freshman undergraduate. And students seemed not to have to share a room as often for academic travel.

When I worked for a large company we were strictly forbidden to share rooms at conferences an similar events. I was told that this was because the company didn't want any liability for anything that might go awry between the two people sharing the room. IANAL, but it seems to me that if the company forces you to share a room, and your coworker does something uncool, that the company would be on the hook for it if you decided to pursue a lawsuit.

I am not a room sharer, except in extraordinary circumstances. However, I am in the tiny tiny tiny minority in my academic library. I have colleagues who not only share rooms, but will without hesitation put three or four people in a room with just two beds. I have known many librarians who look for conference roommates on listservs. I get the impression that it may be more common for librarians than in other fields, which certainly runs against stereotype. So, the writing may indeed be on the wall for you. That said, I fully support just drawing a line in the sand and saying you won't share a room. I won't. I can't imagine being forced to. I'd just continue to book single rooms without comment until the issue actually comes up.

Upon further thought, if two (and only two) people of opposite gender are traveling for work for the same employer, would *they* be expected to share a room? Or, what if the two travelers from the employer are of the same gender, but one of them is homosexual? Would they be expected to share the room then? Wow... I bet this is part of why my employer just doesn't make people share rooms. Honestly, the first time I went on a business trip, I expected that I *would* be asked to share a room with a colleague. But now that I have been on a couple trips where that is not the case, I think I would be pretty upset if I had to or was expected to. I go to work to do my job, not to have slumber parties... Maybe I just value my privacy more than some, but I dunno...