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How to Make Friends Solo Without Forcing It at Every Hostel Bar

How to meet people traveling solo without grinding it out at the hostel bar every night — walking tours as a cheat code, the day-trip group, and the real difference between lonely and alone.

For a long time I thought the only way to figure out how to meet people traveling solo was to plant myself at the hostel bar every night, beer in hand, doing the same exhausting routine. Where you from. How long you here for. Where next. It works, sort of, in the way that going to the gym works if you only ever do one machine. But it’s draining, the conversations are interchangeable, and if you’re even slightly introverted (I am, secretly, despite all this) it can feel like a second job you didn’t apply for.

So here’s what I actually do now, after years of solo trips and a lot of trial and error. The hostel bar is plan C. There are much better plans.

If I could give one piece of advice to a nervous solo traveller it’s this: do the free walking tour on your first morning. Every time. In nearly every city.

Here’s why it works so well. The group is full of solo travellers and pairs who arrived yesterday and know nobody, exactly like you. Everyone’s in the same boat, everyone’s a bit open, and crucially you’ve got a built-in, low-stakes thing to talk about — the city, the guide’s terrible joke about the statue, where to get lunch after. You don’t have to manufacture a conversation out of nothing the way you do at a bar. The walk does it for you.

The structure does the heavy lifting. You’re shoulder to shoulder for two hours, you naturally fall into step with someone, and by the end you’ve got the perfect off-ramp: “a few of us are grabbing lunch, want to come?” That sentence has launched more of my travel friendships than anything I’ve ever said in a bar at 11pm.

Tip them well, by the way. The guides are usually working for tips and they’re often the best source for the un-touristy stuff. I’ve had guides tip me off to a Tuesday-only food market, a back-alley bar with no sign, the one viewpoint that isn’t mobbed at sunset. Ask them where they eat.

The second cheat code: book a small-group day-trip. A hike, a cooking class, a boat thing, a wine-region drive, whatever fits the place.

The magic here is shared experience over time. Bar small talk is shallow because it’s brief and you can bail any second. But spend eight hours in a van getting lost on the way to a waterfall with six strangers and you come back as something close to friends. You’ve shared a minor ordeal. You’ve split snacks. Someone got carsick and everyone rallied. That stuff bonds people in a way that “so, where you off to next?” simply cannot.

Cooking classes are my personal favourite for this. You’re working together, you’re a bit useless together, you eat the result together. By the time the food’s on the table you’ve got six new contacts and a group photo nobody asked for. I’m still in touch with two people from a pasta class in 2022 and we met for about four hours.

The trick is picking activities with built-in interaction and a bit of duration. A quick museum-entry ticket won’t do it. A full-day anything will.

This is the part the “10 ways to make friends solo!!” listicles skip, and it might be the most important. The desperation to not be alone is the exact thing that makes you bad at meeting people.

There’s a real difference between lonely and alone. Alone is just a state — you’re by yourself, eating dinner, reading, wandering. Lonely is a feeling, and it’s the feeling, not the state, that pushes you to force conversations at the bar with people you don’t even click with, just to not be by yourself for one more evening.

When you genuinely get comfortable eating dinner solo — book a real restaurant, sit at the bar or the counter, bring nothing to hide behind if you’re brave — two things happen. One, you stop being miserable on the nights you don’t meet anyone, which is most nights, that’s normal. And two, paradoxically, you become way more approachable and easier to be around, because you’re not radiating need. The connections you make stop being lifeboats and start being choices. That shift changes everything.

Some of my best travel memories are nights I spent entirely alone. A bowl of noodles at a counter in a city where I knew nobody, watching the street. A long solo walk with headphones in. Those weren’t failures to socialise. They were the point.

• Counter seats and communal tables. Skip the table for one tucked in the corner. Sit at the bar of a restaurant, or find places with long shared tables. Proximity does a lot of the work.
• Have one easy question ready. Not “where you from” — everyone’s sick of it. Try “what’s the best thing you’ve eaten here?” People light up. You get a tip and a chat.
• Hobbies travel. Climb, run, play chess, dance — there are local meetups for all of it, full of people who already share your thing. Far easier than starting from zero.
• Stay somewhere with a common space, not just a bar. A hostel with a decent kitchen or a courtyard beats a party hostel for actual conversation, in my experience. The bar selects for one type of night. The kitchen selects for everyone.
• It’s okay to not vibe with people. You don’t have to befriend everyone you meet. Polite, brief, move on. Saving your energy for the people you actually click with is allowed.

The big reframe is this: you’re not trying to make friends with everyone, and you’re definitely not trying to do it by brute force at the bar every single night until it works. You’re putting yourself in a few good situations — the tour, the day-trip, the counter seat — where connection happens naturally, and you’re relaxed enough about being alone that none of it feels like begging.

Stop forcing it. Do the walking tour, book the messy day-trip, learn to love your own company — and the friends turn up on their own, usually when you’ve stopped trying so hard.

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