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Making friends when travelling solo: tips that work

The first night in a new city alone can feel surprisingly quiet. You find a table at a small restaurant somewhere in the backstreets — maybe Hanoi’s Hoàn Kiếm district, maybe the medina in Fès, maybe a side street off Chiang Mai’s Nimman Road — and you eat well, and the food is good, and then you walk back to your room and the silence is its own thing. Not necessarily bad. But there.

Most people who travel solo for long enough hit that rhythm: periods of genuine solitude that feel free and restorative, interrupted by moments when you want to share something with someone who’s also there. The good news is that solo travel is structurally good for meeting people. You’re more approachable alone. You’re more likely to make small decisions — stay for another drink, take a slower route — that open into conversations. The challenge isn’t that connections are impossible. It’s knowing how to put yourself into the situations where they happen naturally.

This is not a list of social hacks. It’s a practical guide to the places, formats, and habits that consistently produce real travel friendships — the kind where you’re still messaging each other six months later, or staying on their couch in Berlin, or meeting again on a different continent entirely.

Choose accommodation that’s built for it

This is the single highest-leverage decision a solo traveller makes. The difference between a private Airbnb apartment and a well-run hostel isn’t just about cost — it’s about density of opportunity.

The best hostels for meeting people have specific features: a common area that people actually use, a communal kitchen where cooking becomes social, and staff who create reasons for guests to be in the same space at the same time. Hostels like The Yard in Budapest’s seventh district, Selina locations in Latin America (Medellín, Oaxaca, Antigua), or the Mad Monkey chain in Southeast Asia have built their entire model around this. You don’t have to stay in a dormitory — most now offer private rooms within the hostel structure, which gives you quiet when you need it and a social floor when you don’t.

Smaller guesthouses run by local families — a pension in Bosnia, a ryokan in a Japanese market town, a casa particular in Havana — offer a different kind of connection: you’re more likely to talk to other guests over a shared breakfast table, and the host themselves often becomes a point of entry into the neighbourhood. It’s slower and less guaranteed than a purpose-built social hostel, but it’s rarely transactional.

If you’re spending two weeks or more in one place, consider house-sitting or a home exchange. The logistics are real (you need lead time, references, and a flexible itinerary), but the payoff — a neighbourhood, a routine, neighbours — is qualitatively different from hotel life. Our article on house sitting as a way to travel for free covers the practicalities in detail.

Use structured activities, not bars

The popular advice to “just go to a bar” is partly right and largely overrated. Bars work when the environment is right — a slow neighbourhood place with a counter where the bartender talks to everyone, a brewpub where people sit at communal tables. But loud, crowded, transient bars produce loud, transient interactions that rarely go anywhere.

Structured activities are more reliable because they give strangers a shared task, which removes the awkwardness of approach. Specifically:

Cooking classes are some of the most socially productive two hours you can spend. A class of eight to twelve people, all standing around the same ingredients, creates easy conversation without anyone having to initiate it. Chiang Mai is particularly good for this — schools like Galangal and Thai Farm Cooking School run half-day classes that end in a shared meal. In Bologna, a four-hour pasta class at La Vecchia Scuola Bolognese on Via Malvasia in the Saragozza neighbourhood typically draws a mix of solo travellers and couples; you leave with a skill, a meal, and often a dinner plan. Costs typically run €60–90 in Europe, 800–1,200 Thai baht in Thailand.

Day tours and group hikes also work well because the activity itself becomes conversation material. A small-group hike into the Atlas Mountains, a shared boat to the islands off Split, a cycling tour through Hanoi’s Old Quarter — these create a few hours of shared reference that strangers can build on. The key detail: small groups (under twelve) produce better social conditions than large bus tours.

Language classes are underused as a social format. A week-long Spanish course in Antigua, Guatemala, or Oaxaca, Mexico, or a Moroccan Arabic class in Fès — these pull together solo travellers who have self-selected for curiosity and commitment. The shared struggle of learning produces camaraderie at a speed that casual sightseeing rarely manages. Antigua has dozens of schools; La Union and Christian Spanish Academy are both reputable and run around USD 180–250 per week for five hours daily with one-on-one instruction, though many also offer group formats.

The practical geography of solo travel sociability

Some places are structurally better for meeting people than others — not because they’re more “friendly,” but because their physical layout and traveller flow create regular, natural crossings.

Southeast Asia’s overland corridor — Bangkok to Chiang Mai, then into Laos, down through Cambodia, into southern Vietnam — is genuinely good for solo travellers because you keep running into the same people. Take the slow boat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang (two days on the Mekong, a boat with fifty strangers and nowhere particular to go), and you’ll likely meet more interesting travellers than in a month of museums. You sit next to someone at the front of the boat; eight hours later you’re sharing noodle soup at a stop along the river. The geography does the work.

Central America works similarly — a well-established backpacker circuit runs from Guatemala City up to Antigua, through the Lago Atitlán villages, across to Belize, and down through Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The hostels know each other; the shuttles run between them; the same faces recur.

The Balkans by train and bus offers a slower, less busy version of the same effect. Travellers on the Ljubljana–Zagreb–Sarajevo–Kotor route tend to move at similar speeds, stay in similar places, and have similar curiosity. The social conditions aren’t forced; they emerge.

The pattern in all three: a defined corridor with limited transport options, a mix of solo travellers, and enough time between destinations that people want to talk.

What to do in cities with less built-in circuit

Not every trip follows a backpacker corridor, and not every city has a hostel scene. If you’re spending a week in Tokyo, or Tbilisi, or Buenos Aires, a different approach produces connections.

Meetup.com and Couchsurfing events are genuinely useful in major cities. Couchsurfing’s weekly meetups — often held in a specific bar or café — aren’t contingent on hosting or being hosted; they’re just open social events. In cities like Istanbul, Warsaw, and São Paulo, these pull a reliable mix of locals and travellers. Quality varies wildly, but the format — open to anyone, no agenda, recurring location — removes the pressure of a one-on-one approach.

Volunteer days and community projects offer a half-day of shared work with a mix of locals and long-term visitors. In most cities, a quick search for “community garden volunteer” or “food bank morning shift” will find something. These aren’t primarily for socialising — they’re for contributing something — but sustained shared work produces the same kind of easy conversation as a cooking class.

Third places with duration — cafés that function as working spaces, libraries with open seating, markets where vendors sit all day — reward patience. The difference between a tourist café and a neighbourhood one is usually two streets and ten minutes. In Medellín’s El Poblado neighbourhood, most of the better conversations happen at the independent coffee spots on Avenida El Poblado rather than the tourist strip. In Lisbon’s Mouraria district, the tables outside the little bars on Rua dos Lagares fill early with locals on their way home; sitting at one for ninety minutes produces something that rushing between sights never does.

The specific moments when it happens

There is no formula, but there are patterns. Most travel friendships begin in one of a small number of situations:

• Waiting — for a bus, a border, a meal to arrive. Boredom and proximity are a reliable combination.
• Shared difficulty — a delayed train, a wrong turn, a language barrier that required collaboration.
• Shared food — sitting at a communal table, being offered something to try, asking what someone is eating.
• Recognising the same person in the second or third place — the slow boat, then the same guesthouse in Luang Prabang, then the same bus to Vang Vieng.

The practical implication: slow down. The traveller who moves through a country in two-night increments, rushing by bus between highlight cities, sees more places but has fewer real encounters. A week in one city — one neighbourhood — builds a recognisable face. The coffee shop owner starts chatting. The other guest at the guesthouse suggests something for dinner. The rhythm of return, even across a week, changes the quality of what’s possible.

Navigating cultural difference honestly

How easy it is to make friends varies enormously depending on where you are and who you are. This is worth being clear about.

In parts of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, hospitality toward strangers is a genuine social norm — you will be invited in, offered tea, shown around — but this is often a cultural reflex rather than the beginning of a peer friendship, and reading it as more personal than it is leads to awkwardness. Accept the hospitality for what it is; don’t mistake it for something else.

In Northern Europe and Japan, strangers are less likely to initiate conversation, but the connections that do form tend to be more measured and consistent. In Japan especially, a structured context — a shared activity, an introduction through a third party — is more reliable than cold approach.

Language matters more than people admit. Even a basic vocabulary in the local language changes the register of interaction entirely. The first ten minutes of a conversation in someone’s own language, however broken, communicates something that no amount of effort in English can replicate. Learning a few phrases of Thai before arriving in Thailand isn’t just courtesy — it’s the fastest way to stop being treated as a tourist.

Gender and perceived identity also shape experience. Solo female travellers in some regions face a different social calculus — approaches that are ostensibly friendly but aren’t, and social spaces where entry requires a specific kind of navigation. Solo female travel in Jordan has its own specific dynamics worth understanding before you go.

A practical comparison: where and how to meet people

Being honest about the harder parts

Making friends while travelling solo is not always easy, and anyone who suggests otherwise is selling something. There are days when you eat alone, walk alone, return alone, and feel the gap between the life you’re living and the idea of it you had before you left. These days exist and they pass.

The travellers who build the richest networks on the road tend to share a few habits: they stay longer in fewer places; they say yes to invitations even when tired; they’re curious about other people’s stories without making their own the centre of every conversation; and they follow up — a message the next day, a plan for the evening, a suggestion to travel in the same direction.

The Psychology Today overview of adult friendship formation points to two consistent factors across research: proximity and repeated, unplanned interaction. Solo travel creates both of these in concentrated form — if you let it. The slow boat, the hostel kitchen, the week in one neighbourhood: these aren’t just travel formats. They’re the conditions under which people actually become friends.

According to research published by the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, it takes roughly 50 hours of time with someone before most people consider them a close friend. That’s not fifty hours of organised socialising — it’s proximity, shared meals, the accumulation of unremarkable time together. Solo travel, if you’re not rushing, creates those hours faster than most ordinary life circumstances do.

The Bottom Line

1. Accommodation is your most important social decision. A well-run hostel with a functioning common area or a small guesthouse with a shared breakfast table produces more genuine connections than any deliberate socialising effort in a private apartment.

2. Structured activities outperform unstructured socialising. Cooking classes, group hikes, language courses, and volunteer mornings give strangers a shared task — which is the most reliable starting point for conversation.

3. Slow down. A week in one neighbourhood builds recognisable faces and repeated encounters. Two nights in ten cities produces a different kind of trip — not necessarily worse, but less likely to generate friendship.

4. Learn the local language, even badly. Ten words of Georgian, Thai, or Arabic changes how people respond to you. It signals investment in a place, and that signal matters.

5. Follow through. A good conversation on a slow boat or a cooking class is only the beginning. The travellers who end up with genuine friendships from the road are the ones who message the next day, propose a plan, and don’t let the momentum of movement break the thread.

Keep reading: How to connect with locals when travelling abroad