Solo Travel in Your 30s and 40s: Meeting People Past the Hostel Bar

Every guide to meeting people while traveling says the same thing: stay in a hostel. And it's good advice if you're 23, you like bunk beds, and you think the pub crawl is the point.

Plenty of solo travelers aren't that. They've got a job they're taking two weeks off from, or a career they're between. They want a door that locks, a bathroom they don't share and eight hours of sleep, and they'd still like to have dinner with someone interesting. Most of the social side of travel wasn't built for them. Here's how to find it anyway.

First, the reassuring part

Meeting people gets easier with age in one important way: you care less. At 22, the hostel common room is a status game. At 38, you can walk up to a table and ask if the seat's free without rehearsing it first.

The people you meet are also self-selected in a useful way. Anyone your age traveling alone made a deliberate choice to do it, and that's usually the start of a good conversation.

Sleep somewhere with a shared table

You don't need a dorm to get the social side of a hostel. What makes hostels sociable isn't the bunks, it's the shared spaces. Look for those, with a private room attached:

• Private rooms in social hostels. Many of the better hostels now have private en-suite rooms that are as nice as a mid-range hotel. You get the bar, the kitchen and the walking tour, and skip the 3am arrivals. Search the reviews for "quiet" and "all ages".
• Guesthouses with a shared breakfast. Riads in Morocco, B&Bs, family-run pensions and guesthouses across Southeast Asia sit everyone at the same breakfast table every morning, which is the easiest conversation starter in travel.
• Coliving spaces, if you're staying a few weeks or working remotely. They're built around shared kitchens and organised events, and the crowd tends to be older than in hostels.

Book things with a shared goal

The quickest way to meet people your age is to do something that filters for them. A few formats that reliably do:

• Cooking classes and food tours. Pricey enough to skew older, small enough to talk, and they end with everyone eating together.
• Multi-day hikes and small-group tours. Check an operator's typical ages before booking. Some sell themselves on 18 to 35, and some pointedly don't.
• Language schools. A week of morning lessons in Spanish, Portuguese or Italian puts you in a class with a genuinely wide age range, and the afternoons fill themselves with people from your class.
• Wine tastings and brewery tours, for obvious reasons.
• Run clubs. Social run clubs now meet in most big cities, they're usually free, and the coffee afterwards is the real event.
• A dinner plan on Suppertime. Travelers of every age post them, and you pick by the restaurant and the hour, not by who's loudest in the common room.

Take the counter, not the table

At home you'd book a table. On your own, sit at the bar or the kitchen counter, where the people either side of you are often alone too and the bartender is paid to talk to you. It works best in wine bars and tapas bars, which skew older than clubs and hostel bars. Our guide to eating dinner alone goes deeper on this.

Pick cities that suit how you travel

Some cities have a social life built for backpackers in their twenties. Others are easy at any age because their social life happens over long dinners and in cafés. Lisbon, Mexico City, Tbilisi and Tokyo are all great alone, for different reasons, and our month-by-month list for 2027 picks a city for every month. Wherever you go, timing matters more than the city: a festival week or a run of long warm evenings does half the work.

Say yes to the second invitation

One habit matters more than everything above: when someone you met earlier suggests something later, say yes. The person from the cooking class suggesting a drink, the guesthouse neighbour asking if you want to share a taxi to the ruins tomorrow. The first meeting is luck. The second is the start of a friendship.

Or skip the luck

Suppertime is for travelers who want the company but not the bunk bed. Open it in your city and you'll see small plans other travelers have posted for the next few hours: a dinner, a gallery, a glass of wine somewhere good, a hike. Join one, or post your own and pick the restaurant yourself. Each plan has its own group chat that disappears afterwards, and there's no profile to keep up. It's free on iOS.