There is a moment on every solo trip that nobody warns you about. It usually hits around day two or three. You are sitting at a gorgeous little restaurant, the kind you would have screenshotted on Instagram and sent to your group chat with the caption “we NEED to go here.” The food is incredible. The sunset is doing that thing where the sky looks like someone painted it. And you are alone.
Not in a dramatic, sad way. Just in a quiet way. The kind where you think: I wish I had someone to say “oh my God, taste this” to.
If you have felt that, you are not broken and you are not doing solo travel wrong. You are just human. And the good news is that solo travel is, paradoxically, one of the best ways to make real friendships. Not polite small talk. Not LinkedIn connections. Real ones.
Here is how it actually happens.
First, Let Go of the Pressure to Be the “Cool Solo Traveller”
There is this unspoken expectation that solo female travellers should be effortlessly independent. Wandering through cobblestone streets with a journal and a flat white, needing no one, bothered by nothing. And sure, those moments exist and they are wonderful. But so do the moments where you feel awkward eating alone, or where you really wish someone else was there to figure out the bus schedule with you.
Both are normal. Both are part of it. The women who end up making the best connections on the road are usually not the ones who pretend they do not need anyone. They are the ones who are honest enough to say “hey, do you want to grab dinner? I have no idea what I am doing either.”
That vulnerability is not weakness. It is literally the door that opens everything.
The Hostel Common Room Is Still Undefeated
I know, I know. You might be past the hostel phase. But hear me out. Even if you book a private room, the common area of a good hostel is still the single best place to meet other solo travellers. It is engineered for exactly this. Everyone is in the same situation: new city, no plans, looking for someone to explore with.
The trick is not to sit in the corner scrolling your phone. Make a cup of tea. Sit somewhere visible. Make eye contact. And when someone sits near you, just say something simple. “Have you been here long?” or “Any idea where to get good coffee around here?” works every single time. People are waiting for someone else to go first.
If hostels really are not your thing, boutique guesthouses and B&Bs with communal breakfasts offer the same dynamic in a quieter, more intimate way. The shared table at breakfast is magic. Nowhere else in life do strangers sit down together and just start talking so naturally.
Walking Tours and Day Trips: Friendship Accelerators
A three-hour walking tour with a small group does something strange to social barriers. You are walking side by side, listening to the same stories, reacting to the same things. By the end of it, you have inside jokes with people whose names you learned ninety minutes ago.
Free walking tours are great for this (just remember to tip your guide). But any small-group activity works: cooking classes, wine tastings, boat trips, snorkelling excursions. The key is small group. A bus tour with 45 people is not the same energy as a cooking class with 8.
Here is what usually happens: you notice another woman on the tour who is also alone. You catch each other’s eye during a funny moment. One of you says “are you solo too?” and suddenly you have dinner plans. It really is that simple. And that connection, born from a shared moment in a place neither of you are from, often turns into something that lasts far beyond the trip.
The Coffee Shop and the Communal Table
Solo travel runs on coffee. And coffee shops, especially the kind with big communal tables and good wifi, are quiet friendship incubators. You are not going to become best friends with someone over a latte. But you might start a conversation that leads to “I am heading to this market later if you want to come.”
The same goes for food markets, wine bars with bar seating, and anywhere with communal tables. The physical setup matters more than you think. When you are sitting at a table for one, tucked in a corner, you are invisible. When you are at a shared table or a bar, you are part of the room.
A small thing that works surprisingly well: ask someone to watch your stuff while you go to the bathroom. When you come back, say thanks, and now you have a reason to talk. It sounds silly. It works.
Facebook Groups and WhatsApp Communities
This is where solo female travel has genuinely changed in the last few years. There are now massive online communities of women who travel alone, and many of them have local meetup threads or “anyone in Barcelona this week?” posts.
The Solo Female Travelers Network on Facebook has millions of members. There are countless smaller groups for specific regions or travel styles. And WhatsApp communities, including ours at Solo Yet Together ,
are full of women who are either about to travel, currently somewhere amazing, or just got back and want to share what they learned.
Post before you go. “I will be in Split from the 15th to the 20th, anyone around?” You will be surprised how many women respond. And because everyone in these groups understands the solo travel experience, the awkwardness of meeting a stranger from the internet is massively reduced. You already have the most important thing in common.
Be the One Who Asks
This is the part that feels hardest and matters most. Most solo travellers are waiting for someone else to make the first move. Everyone is hoping someone will invite them along. Almost nobody wants to be the one who asks.
So be the one who asks.
“Want to split a taxi to the old town?” “I found this restaurant that looks amazing, do you want to come?” “A few of us are going to watch the sunset from the fortress, you should join.” These sentences change trips. They change how you experience a place. And honestly, they change you. Because every time you put yourself out there and it works, and it almost always works, you build a confidence that has nothing to do with travel and everything to do with who you are becoming.
The worst that can happen is someone says no. And even that is fine, because you will never see them again.
Small Group Trips: The Shortcut
If all of the above sounds exhausting, the initiating, the hoping, the figuring it out on the fly, there is an easier way. Small group trips designed for solo women remove the entire problem.
You show up. The group is already there. The itinerary is sorted. The ice is broken for you because everyone is in the same situation: women who wanted to travel but did not want to do every single part of it alone. By day two, you are sharing sunscreen and life stories. By day four, you have a group chat that will outlive the trip by years.
This is exactly why we built Solo Yet Together. Not because solo travel is bad. It is incredible. But because the best travel memories almost always involve other people. And sometimes you need a little structure to make those connections happen, especially in a new country where you do not speak the language and you are not sure where to even start.
Our trips are groups of 6 to 8 women, led by a local woman guide, in places like Croatia and the Balkans. No single supplements. No forced fun. Just real women, real conversations, and the kind of friendships that start over a shared bottle of Croatian wine and somehow never end.
The Friends You Make Travelling Are Different
There is something about meeting someone when both of you are far from home, out of your routines, a little bit vulnerable, and wide open to the world. The friendships that form in those conditions are not like the ones you make at work or through mutual friends. They skip the surface level entirely.
You do not talk about what you do for a living for the first three conversations. You talk about what you are afraid of, what you are running towards, what you left behind to be here. You share a room or a sunset or a terrible bus ride, and suddenly this stranger knows things about you that your colleagues of five years do not.
Some of these friendships fade after the trip, and that is okay. But some of them do not. Some of them become the person you text when you are booking your next trip, or the one who shows up at your door six months later saying “remember when we said we should do Portugal next?”
Those friendships are out there, waiting for you, in a hostel common room or a walking tour or a WhatsApp group or a small group trip on a Croatian island. All you have to do is go.
Not ready to do it completely alone? Our Solo Yet Together trips are designed for exactly this, women who want the adventure of travel without the loneliness of doing every part of it solo. Small groups, local guides, and the kind of friendships that start on day one. See upcoming trips
