You are on the fourth morning of a fortnight in Lisbon, and the same person has taken the table by the window at your guesthouse breakfast three days running. So far the conversation has been limited to good morning. If neither of you suggests the tram up to the castle by Friday, the chance will pass, and most of what decides the outcome was settled when the trip was booked.
Solo Travel in Numbers
ABTA, the British travel association, reported in March 2024 that 16% of holidaymakers had travelled alone in the 12 months to August 2023, up from 11% the year before. The share was highest among 25 to 34-year-olds, at 19%, and among 35 to 44-year-olds it more than doubled, from 6% to 13%.
A 2024 survey of solo travellers by Hostelworld, the hostel booking company, found that meeting new people was the most popular answer to the question of what solo travel does best, chosen by 43%. It also found that 34% worried about finding it hard to make friends on the road. People travelling alone want to meet others and expect it to be difficult, so an opening line from a stranger at the same table is usually well received.
Group Activities With Strangers
A cooking class or a week-long sailing course puts the same small group of strangers side by side for hours. The activity gives everyone something to talk about besides themselves, and that removes most of the awkwardness from a first conversation.
A walking tour of 40 people breaks into pairs and threes that rarely change, while a class of 10 tends to sit and eat together. Multi-day formats work better than single sessions because people who meet on the first day of a five-day course have four more days to continue the conversation without having to arrange anything.
A language course works the same way at a slower pace. Two weeks of morning classes in Seville or Lisbon puts a dozen adults of very mixed ages in the same room every day, and many schools run evening walks and dinners for their students. By the second week the class has usually split into smaller groups who eat together, and nobody had to approach a stranger cold to make that happen.
Relationship Choices Away From Home
People meet on holiday with different aims, and the aims rarely match by accident. One person wants a romance that ends at the departure gate, and another hopes for something to continue at home. A third is open to less conventional relationships, from an age-gap partnership to sugar daddy dating.
A word about this early in the trip costs very little and spares both people a misunderstanding on the last night, when there is no time left to sort it out.
The Same Place, Every Day
In 1950 the psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back studied friendships among married students in the Westgate housing complex at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Residents were assigned their flats, and 44% of the friendship pairs they recorded lived next door to each other. Later research on college friendships found the same distance effect, with proximity predicting who became friends more strongly than shared interests did.
A traveller who changes city every two days meets a great many people once. A traveller who stays a week in one neighbourhood sees the same café owner and the same guests at breakfast every day, and repeated contact of that kind is how acquaintance turns into something more. A small guesthouse with a shared breakfast table has far more of it than a resort with 600 rooms.
Counters and Communal Tables
Where a traveller sits affects how many conversations begin. A table for two leaves a solo traveller facing an empty chair. Someone eating alone at the bar has no empty chair opposite and sits beside other people, within easy reach of the staff. Tapas bars in Spain and sushi counters in Japan are built around this kind of seating.
Communal tables in hostels, guesthouses and some restaurants have the same effect for larger groups. Asking the person beside you to pass the bread or recommend a dish is an ordinary request in that setting, and it leads into conversation with no awkward opening.
Shared Nerves on the Bridge
The psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron ran a study in Vancouver in 1974 on the Capilano Suspension Bridge, a narrow crossing high above a river, sending a female interviewer to approach men walking across. She gave each man her phone number. About half of the men interviewed on the swaying bridge called her afterwards, compared with 12.5% of men interviewed on a low, solid bridge nearby. The authors argued that the men had mistaken fear for attraction.
Later researchers questioned the conclusion, and a reanalysis of the data did not support all of it. A zipline or a rough boat crossing gives two people a shared moment of nerves, though the evidence is too thin to promise more than that.
A Few Words of the Local Language
A few evenings before the trip are enough to learn 20 or 30 phrases, and they change how conversations with residents begin, since a greeting and a question in Portuguese or Thai usually gets a friendlier reply than the same question in English. The phrases also give a traveller a reason to ask for help with pronunciation, which is an easy and low-stakes way to start talking to someone at the next table.
Drinks, Safety and Late Nights
Alcohol makes it easier to talk to strangers, and that is the reason to keep track of it. The UK Foreign Office has warned travellers about drink spiking in several popular destinations, and in November 2024 at least six foreign tourists, including two 19-year-old Australians, died after drinking alcohol tainted with methanol in the Laos backpacker town of Vang Vieng. The basic precautions are to watch drinks being made and to avoid unlabelled local spirits.
It is a basic habit to meet someone new in a busy public place and to tell a friend at home or a travel companion where you will be. The accommodation address can stay private until there is a reason to trust the other person.
The Week After the Flight Home
A holiday meeting ends with a decision that is easy to put off until the last day. Two people who met in Lisbon and live 3,000 kilometres apart have to agree on a second meeting and on who travels, and an early conversation about aims makes that agreement easier. A fortnight of shared breakfasts shows how two people get on when neither of them has to work. How will they get on during an ordinary week, with jobs and errands and no guesthouse table between them?
