I met Priya at a sink. Not a bar, not a walking tour, not a curated "solo travelers meetup" — a bathroom sink in a six-bed dorm in Ljubljana, both of us brushing our teeth at 11pm and complaining about the same overnight bus. Three days later we'd rearranged our entire Slovenia itineraries around each other, split a rental car to Lake Bled, and she was the one who talked me out of an overpriced spa package I didn't actually want. We still text most weeks. That's the part nobody prepares you for before a first solo trip: the loneliness people warn you about is real some evenings, but the friendships that show up to fill it rarely arrive the way you'd planned. I'd gone into that trip half-expecting to eat most dinners alone with a paperback, and instead I came home with a group chat that's still active nine months later. Nothing about that was engineered — it happened because I was in a room designed to force it, at a time of night when nobody's guard is fully up.
Most advice about solo travel and making friends is either too vague ("just be open!") or too mechanical ("download this app"). Neither one tells you where women actually meet people who become real friends, not just a shared dinner and a polite goodbye. The pattern, once you've done it a few times, is pretty specific — and some of the advice everyone repeats is actually the wrong advice for this particular goal.
Skip the Private Room If You Actually Want Company
This is the trade-off nobody says out loud: privacy and social contact are opposites, and you have to pick one for at least part of the trip. A private Airbnb is calmer, quieter, and completely isolating unless you're already deliberately seeking people out elsewhere. A shared dorm forces contact whether you want it or not — you're changing clothes eight feet from a stranger, comparing notes on where to eat, negotiating who gets the top bunk. That friction is exactly what produces conversation.
Selina and Generator both design their hostels around this on purpose — communal kitchens, nightly bar events, rooftop hangouts that cost nothing to join. A dorm bed at a Selina in Lisbon or Mexico City runs somewhere between £18 and £35 a night depending on season, which is often less than a mid-range hotel room and comes with a built-in social scene attached. Wombat's in Vienna and Prague runs a similar model with a genuinely popular "Wombar" that fills up every night with a mix of long-stay backpackers and people passing through for two days. If you're working remotely and staying longer than a week, Outsite runs co-living houses in places like Lisbon and Bali built specifically around shared workspaces and communal dinners, which solves the same problem for a slightly older, more settled crowd than the average hostel dorm. The common thread across all of them is a shared kitchen or lounge that people are actually expected to use, not a lobby everyone walks straight through. Book the dorm — or the co-living bed — for at least the first two or three nights of any solo trip, even if the plan later is to switch to a private room once you've already got people to travel alongside.
The Apps Built for This, Not Repurposed Dating Apps
Bumble BFF gets recommended constantly and it works reasonably well in cities where you're staying more than a few days, but it wasn't built for travel — it's a dating app's friend-mode add-on, and matches often ghost or want to meet somewhere far from where you're actually staying. Travel Ladies is built specifically for women moving through unfamiliar cities: local safety notes, a chat function organized by destination, and a community that skews toward people who are also there for a few days rather than locals looking for a long-term friend group. It's free, though the safety-report crowdsourcing is the more useful feature than the friend-matching itself.
The bigger win, honestly, is Facebook groups — specifically Girls LOVE Travel, which has passed 2.8 million members and runs city-specific threads where you can post "in Porto until Thursday, anyone around?" and get three replies within the hour. It sounds old-fashioned next to a slick app, and the group is loosely moderated enough that some threads go nowhere. But the volume of people posting real-time, real-location requests is what makes it work — you're not swiping through profiles, you're catching someone who's also awake, also bored, also five minutes from the same café. The smaller Solo Female Travelers group runs on a similar model with less noise and more detailed safety threads, which makes it the better pick if you'd rather scroll through fewer, more substantial posts than skim a firehose.
Reddit's r/solotravel is worth a mention too, though it's better for logistics than for actually meeting someone that day — itinerary sanity-checks, hostel recommendations, warnings about scams in a specific neighborhood. Use it before the trip to plan, use Girls LOVE Travel or Travel Ladies once you're actually on the ground and want a person in front of you within the hour.
Free Walking Tours Are the Cheapest Icebreaker in Travel
Sandemans New Europe runs pay-what-you-want walking tours in over 30 cities, and they're built almost by accident into the best low-pressure way to meet people. You show up, you're in a group of fifteen to thirty strangers for two hours, and by the halfway point you're usually chatting with whoever's walking next to you about where they've already been and where they're headed next. The guide typically ends the tour by naming a nearby bar where anyone's welcome to keep going — no obligation, no awkward "so, drinks?" moment you have to initiate yourself.
That's the whole trick.
You don't have to be the one who suggests hanging out. Someone else already built that transition into the structure of the afternoon, which removes the single biggest reason solo travelers don't approach anyone: the fear of being the one who has to ask.
Small-Group Trips Solve the Problem Before It Starts
Flash Pack runs small-group trips of eight to twelve people, mostly aimed at solo travelers in their thirties and forties, with itineraries in places like Sri Lanka, Jordan, and Costa Rica running roughly £1,400 to £2,500 for a week including most meals and activities. Intrepid Travel's women's expeditions do something similar at a lower price point, often under £1,000 for a week in destinations like Morocco or Vietnam, with an all-female group and a local female guide. Both remove the entire question of "will I meet anyone" by putting you in a group before the trip even starts.
The catch is real, though: paying a premium for a curated group isn't the same as organic friendship, and some travelers find the itinerary-locked structure claustrophobic after day four. A few people on every Flash Pack trip clearly signed up expecting instant best friends and left disappointed when the group chemistry turned out to be merely fine rather than magical. Go in expecting good company for the week and useful contacts afterward, not a guaranteed lifelong friendship, and the format works a lot better.
Say Yes to the Slightly Awkward Invitation
Here's the part that's less about tools and more about instinct: you will get invited to things that feel mildly inconvenient, slightly outside your comfort zone, or later than you'd planned to be up. Say yes anyway, more often than feels natural. The dinner invite from the German woman you met an hour ago at check-in, the 6am hike someone in your dorm mentioned in passing, the "we're getting one more drink, come" — these are disproportionately the moments that turn into actual friendships, because they require both people to choose each other slightly outside of convenience.
I'd push back on one piece of common advice here: the idea that you should "trust your gut" and only say yes when it feels completely comfortable. Comfortable is what you already know. New friendships, almost by definition, start in the mildly uncomfortable zone — tired, unsure if you'll actually like these people, wondering if you'd rather just go to bed. Say yes through that discomfort a handful of times on a trip and the odds shift heavily in your favor.
What Actually Keeps a Travel Friendship Alive After You Both Fly Home
Most travel friendships die within a week of both people getting home, and it's rarely because the connection wasn't real — it's because nobody made the first move once real life resumed. The fix is unglamorous: start a WhatsApp group the day you meet, not the day you say goodbye. Send the group a photo, a stupid joke, a "made it to the airport" message within the first 48 hours after parting ways, before the momentum has a chance to fade. The friendships from my own trips that survived past the six-month mark all had one thing in common — someone messaged first within two days, not two weeks.
Plan one small thing together before you separate, even something as minor as agreeing to send each other a postcard from your next stop. A concrete, tiny commitment does more to keep a friendship alive than a vague "we should totally visit each other sometime" ever will.
The friend from that Ljubljana bathroom sink flew back to Mumbai, I flew back to Manchester, and neither of us has visited the other yet. But she's the first person I message when I'm planning a trip anywhere near her, and last month she talked me through a work decision at 1am her time because she happened to be awake. That's what actually came out of one overnight bus and a shared complaint about a bathroom queue — not a curated meetup, not an app match, just two tired women brushing their teeth in the same dorm.