Solo Travel Loneliness: How to Find Company Without Compromising Safety

Solo travel gets romanticized, but the isolating stretches are real too — eating alone every meal, no one to split a view with, going quiet for days at a time. It’s also a bigger group than it looks: 58% of travelers said they planned to travel solo in 2024.

Most guides about solo travel focus on the upside, independence, flexibility, no compromising on the itinerary, and skip past the specific evenings where none of that feels like a fair trade. Both things are true at once, and it’s worth planning for the second one instead of just hoping it doesn’t come up.

Why hostels and group tours don’t fully solve it

Hostel common rooms and group tours help, but they’re inconsistent — you’re at the mercy of who else happens to be there that particular week.

A great hostel common room one week can be a dead, empty one the next, through no fault of your own, just bad timing. Group tours have the same problem in reverse: they guarantee company for the duration of the tour, but that company disappears the moment it ends, and you’re back to solo again for the rest of the evening.

Neither is a bad option, and both are worth using when they’re available. The gap they leave is really about reliability: you can’t plan around a hostel common room having the right people in it on a given night, which matters most on the specific evenings you know in advance are going to be harder than others.

Activity matching while traveling

Find someone locally who wants to do the same specific thing — a hike, a market, a day trip. Works whether you’re hoping for a fellow traveler or an actual local’s read on the plan.

It’s especially useful for the kind of activity that’s genuinely more fun shared than solo, a multi-course tasting menu, a day hike with a summit view, a night out somewhere with live music. Here’s a fuller rundown of how activity matching works if you want the mechanics of setting one up.

Booking a local companion for a longer stretch

For the more isolated stretches of a trip, a few hours with a Local Buddy gets you both company and a local’s actual perspective — not just someone to avoid eating alone with. Here’s what to expect from a booking like that.

It tends to work best when it’s planned rather than a last-minute decision made in a low moment. Booking a day or two ahead, once you already know roughly where the trip’s quieter stretches will fall, gives you a better chance of getting someone whose interests actually line up with what you want out of the time.

Two evenings, handled differently

Say a trip runs a full week. Most evenings are fine on their own, dinner alone with a book or a podcast, some downtime after a long day of walking. But two or three evenings tend to stand out as the ones that actually feel lonely rather than just quiet, often a Friday or Saturday when the whole city seems to be out with someone.

One version of that evening is spent scrolling a phone in a hotel room, waiting for it to pass. The other version is a couple of hours booked with a Local Buddy earlier in the day, timed specifically to land on the evening that would otherwise be the hardest one. Same trip, same budget, meaningfully different evening, and the only real difference is planning for the low point instead of being surprised by it.

The safety trade-off doesn’t have to exist

The instinct is that meeting strangers while traveling alone is inherently riskier — 66% of solo travelers say they worry about personal safety on the road. Verification and structure are what close that gap: verified accounts only, meetups in public, payments on-platform — an off-platform payment request is itself a scam red flag according to the FTC — and a Vibe Check confirmation afterward — full details in our Trust & Safety guide and the same core meetup safety habits explained in full here.

A few travel-specific habits

Share your live location with someone at home during the meetup. Keep the first meeting short — coffee before committing to a full afternoon. Trust your gut over politeness if something feels off.

It also helps to keep a rough sense of your own schedule flexible around a first meetup, rather than booking it right before a flight or a train you can’t miss. Giving yourself room to end things early without a hard deadline looming makes it easier to leave if you need to, and easier to stay longer if it’s going well.

And build in one flexible evening toward the end of the trip specifically, rather than filling every night with a fixed plan. Solo travel goes better with a little slack in the schedule, and that slack is exactly where a spontaneous activity match or a last-minute Local Buddy booking tends to fit best.