How to Make Friends Fast in Every City When Travelling

Making friends while travelling is easier than most people expect, and harder than the travel content on social media makes it look. The highlight reel shows spontaneous group dinners and laughing strangers on rooftops. The reality involves a bit more intention than that: choosing the right accommodation, showing up when you’d rather stay in, sending the message before you talk yourself out of it.

The good news is that the infrastructure for meeting people while travelling has never been better. Platforms like Hostelworld have built social tools directly into the booking process. The travellers in every city you visit are, in very large numbers, looking for exactly the same thing you are.

This guide covers the practical strategies that actually work: how to use the Hostelworld app’s social features to meet people before you even arrive, how to pick a hostel that makes connection inevitable, what kinds of activities turn strangers into travel companions, and the small moves that experienced solo travellers make consistently to build a social life in every new city.

The chats are full of it. “Anyone want to explore the city today?” “Solo traveller looking for friends.” “Who’s down for drinks?” The invitations are already out there.

Book Your Next Hostel

🏨 Start With Where You Stay

The single most impactful decision you make for meeting people while travelling is where you sleep. A social hostel with communal spaces, organized events, and staff who actively bring guests together is not just a bed. It’s your social infrastructure for that part of the trip.

Not all hostels are built the same. A hostel with a bar, a communal kitchen, and a rooftop terrace generates connection almost passively: people gather, conversations start, plans form. A hostel where everyone retreats to their dorm doesn’t, regardless of how friendly the guests might be.

When booking specifically for social connection, look for:

• Organized weekly events listed in the property description
• Common areas described in reviews as lively or welcoming
• A bar or shared kitchen where guests spend time outside their rooms
• Reviews that specifically mention meeting people or making friends
• High ratings in the atmosphere category on Hostelworld

The hostel you choose sets the ceiling on your social possibilities for that stay. Choose it with that in mind.

📱 The Hostelworld App: Meet People Before You Land

Here’s the part most travellers don’t know about, and it changes the dynamic completely.

When you book a hostel through Hostelworld, you get access to two chat features that open up the social possibilities before you’ve even packed your bag.

Hostel Chat connects you with other guests staying at your specific hostel. You can join 48 hours before check-in. The conversations look exactly like the ones from the real chat logs:

“Just arrived, anyone up for exploring the city today?”
“Who’s doing temples tomorrow?”
“Heading out for drinks at 8, hmu if you want to join.”

By the time you walk through the hostel door, you can already have plans.

City Chat connects you with travellers staying at any hostel in the city. Not just yours. All of them. It’s where people organize meetups across properties, share tips, and find travel companions for day trips.

“I’d love to check out one of the night markets, anyone keen to split a Grab?”
“Anyone doing the hop-on hop-off boat to the temples tomorrow?”

Both features are free with any confirmed booking, in the Chat tab of the app.

Discover Social Pass

🌍 The Hostelworld Social Pass: Connect Without a Booking

The Social Pass extends Hostelworld’s social features beyond the moment of booking. Available in 180+ cities, it gives you access to city chats, curated meetups, local events, and traveller profiles even when you’re between bookings, planning ahead from home, or travelling in a way that doesn’t involve a traditional hostel stay.

What it unlocks:

• City chats without a confirmed hostel reservation
• Curated local meetups designed to bring travellers together
• Traveller profiles to find people with similar routes and interests
• The full social layer of the Hostelworld app, in any destination

For solo travellers, this matters most during the planning phase and during transitions between places, precisely when the gap between one social situation and the next feels widest. The Social Pass keeps you connected to the community of travellers in a city before you’re physically there.

Available through the Hostelworld app on iOS and Android.

Discover Hostelworld Events

🎉 Show Up for Hostel Events

The single lowest-effort, highest-return thing you can do to meet people in a hostel is attend the events. Pub crawls. Walking tours. Group dinners. Rooftop sundowners. Games nights. These are not embarrassing tourist activities. They’re social occasions engineered to do the hard work of introduction for you.

Everyone who shows up is in the same position: hoping to meet someone.

The real chat logs are full of it. “Going on a food tour tomorrow with a guide, she’s got room for 3 or 4 extra people if anybody wants to join. Who’s down?” That message went out in Hanoi. Twenty minutes later, a group had formed around a food tour that nobody had planned to go on alone.

That’s the point of hostel events. They create the conditions for something to happen. You show up. The format takes over.

The Hostelworld Events page at hostelworld.com/events lists events in cities worldwide, from walking tours and pub crawls to local markets and cultural experiences. Check it before you arrive and you’ll have a social plan before you need one.

🍜 Night Markets, Food Tours and the Best Social Activities

Some activities generate connection better than others, and knowing which ones helps you choose your days intentionally.

The highest-yield social activities for meeting people while travelling:

• Night markets: crowded, affordable, and full of natural shared moments. “I’d love to check out one of the night markets, anyone keen to split a Grab?” came from Bangkok City Chat and turned into a group of five people who’d never met sharing street food for three hours.
• Food tours: small groups, a shared task, built-in conversation, and a local guide who mediates the social dynamic. “Hi! Going on a food tour tomorrow, she’s got room for 3/4 extra people if anybody wants to join,” from Hanoi.
• Free walking tours: two to three hours of walking with strangers in a new city, and it usually ends at a bar. Every major city has them.
• Cooking classes: the small group format and shared activity make talking almost unavoidable.
• Boat trips and island hops: shared transport + a beautiful setting + time with nothing else to do = conversation happens.

🤝 The Message You’re Afraid to Send

The most consistent pattern in the real Hostelworld chat logs is the opening move: a simple, direct message to a group of strangers asking if anyone wants to do something.

“Anyone want to explore the city today??” (Amsterdam)
“Solo traveller arrived today, anyone down for food and a few drinks?” (Ho Chi Minh City)
“Just arrived, anyone wants to go out for drinks tonight?” (Hanoi)
“Hey, I’m solo, do you want to explore the city tomorrow by ourselves?” (Bangkok)

None of these messages is clever or elaborate. They’re just honest. Someone arrived somewhere new, wanted company, and said so. That’s the entire skill. The message itself is the hard part, and it’s much less hard than it seems.

In a hostel common room or a group chat, everyone reading that message is rooting for you. Most of them want to say yes. The ones who do are now your plans for the evening.

🏃 Get Out and Join the City

Hostels are the starting point, not the whole picture. Every city has a social ecosystem, and some of the best friend-making on the road happens outside the accommodation entirely.

Activities that naturally create connection:

• Parkrun: free 5km run in a park, every Saturday morning, in 22+ countries. You run with locals, chat with other travellers, and it often ends with coffee. “Going to a run club tomorrow at 7pm in District 7 if anyone’s keen to join!” from Ho Chi Minh City is exactly this energy.
• Language exchanges: meetup.com and local Facebook groups surface these in most cities. You meet locals, speak their language, they practise yours.
• Sports and game events: “Anyone down to watch Liverpool vs Marseille tonight?” from Helsinki. A shared team is a shared identity. Sports bars during big matches are some of the easiest social environments in travel.
• Volunteer days: one-day opportunities with local NGOs create connection through shared purpose rather than shared idle time.

The common thread: activities with built-in structure make talking inevitable. You don’t need to be outgoing. You just need to show up.

💬 The Practical Conversation Toolkit

Making friends while travelling isn’t about having the perfect opener. It’s about having any opener, and the hostel context makes even the most basic questions work.

Lines that actually come up in hostel common rooms:

• “Where are you from?” (obvious, but it works every time)
• “How long have you been here?” (naturally leads to recommendations)
• “Are you going to the hostel thing tonight?” (events give you an instant shared reference)
• “Do you know anywhere good to eat near here?” (food is universally safe territory)
• “I’m thinking of doing [activity] tomorrow, want to join?” (direct, low-pressure)

The longer you wait to speak to someone, the more significant the interaction becomes in your head. The first conversation in a new hostel is almost always the most important one. Make it happen fast, even briefly, and the rest becomes easy.

The exchange of Instagram handles is the modern version of keeping in touch. Most travellers do it within the first few hours of meeting. It’s a low-commitment way to stay connected, share location updates, and occasionally end up in the same city again by design or by coincidence.

🗺️ Sharing Your Travel Plan: Meeting People Along the Route

One of the most underused features in the Hostelworld app is the ability to share your travel plan and let others join, or to browse other travellers’ plans and add yourself to trips that match your route.

This turns solo travel planning into something more collaborative. Someone doing the same Southeast Asia circuit, the same Balkan loop, or the same South American route is out there, and this feature connects you before you’re both independently sitting in a Hanoi hostel wondering if anyone else is heading to Ha Giang.

The real chats show this pattern constantly: “Going to Ha Giang loop on the 28th or 29th, would be happy if we have some company.” “Going to Guatape from Medellín on the 26th, anyone want to ride together?” Shared plans reduce the friction of solo travel and create the kind of coincidental companions that become the best stories.

✅ Final Thoughts: The Invitation Is Already Out There

Making friends while travelling is less about personality and more about positioning. Be where the people are. Use the tools that already exist. Send the message.

The Hostelworld app’s Hostel Chat and City Chat are full of travellers doing exactly what you’re trying to do. The Events page has activities that make connection inevitable. The hostel common room at dinner time has a communal table that exists for exactly this reason.

The chats from Amsterdam to Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi carry the same energy: someone arrived somewhere, wanted company, and asked. “Anyone want to explore the city today?” It works every time someone is brave enough to send it.

You don’t have to be outgoing. You just have to show up and say something. The rest follows.

Download the Hostelworld app to start booking now

❓ FAQs: Making Friends While Travelling