The Fear Is Real. Go Anyway.
Before my first solo trip, I convinced myself approximately fourteen times that I shouldn’t go. The fears were specific and varied: What if I get sick? What if I get lost in an airport? What if I’m lonely the whole time? What if I hate it? What if something bad happens?
What actually happened: I got slightly lost once, found my way, ate dinner alone for the first time and discovered I liked it, had a conversation with a stranger that I still think about years later, and came home feeling more like myself than I had in years.
The fears don’t go away before a solo trip. You go despite them, and then they go away.
Choosing Your First Solo Destination Wisely
First solo trips succeed or fail partly based on destination choice. The goal is to choose somewhere that gives you the experience of independence without unnecessary difficulty.
Good First Solo Destinations
- Japan: Extremely safe, well-organized, incredible public transport, almost zero hassle for solo travelers
- Portugal: English widely spoken, very safe, manageable cities, excellent value
- New Zealand: English-speaking, built for independent travelers, safety-focused culture
- Thailand (Chiang Mai or specific areas of Bangkok): Well-established solo travel infrastructure, friendly culture, affordable
- Iceland: Safe, spectacular, manageable, good English proficiency throughout
Destinations to Save for Later Solo Trips
This isn’t about danger — it’s about complexity. Some destinations require more local language, more navigation sophistication, or more experience reading unfamiliar situations. Save those for when you’ve built confidence on simpler routes.
Safety Without Paranoia
Solo travel safety advice tends toward one of two extremes: either dismissive (‘it’s fine, just go!’) or anxious (‘always do this, never do that’). Neither is helpful. Here’s the practical middle ground:
What Actually Reduces Risk
- Share your itinerary with someone at home before departure — a simple document with hotels, flight numbers, and a contact for each destination
- Trust your gut. If a situation or person makes you uncomfortable, you owe no one an explanation for removing yourself
- Don’t walk around in unfamiliar areas late at night in a new city until you’ve been there a few days and understand the geography
- Keep a small amount of local currency in your shoe or a secondary pocket — not because you expect to be robbed, but because it removes any scenario where you’re stranded
- Know the number of the local emergency services and your country’s embassy in your destination
What Doesn’t Actually Help
- Avoiding solo travel entirely because of remote risks
- Staying in your hotel room because the world feels unfamiliar (it always does at first, then it doesn’t)
- Trusting online safety rankings more than your in-person read of a situation
On Loneliness (The Part Nobody Talks About Honestly)
Solo travel is sometimes lonely. This is true and it’s okay to say it. The meal where you wish you had someone to laugh with. The beautiful view that feels slightly different without someone to share it. The long transit where everyone around you seems to be in pairs.
But here’s what’s also true: solo travel loneliness is different from daily loneliness. It exists against a backdrop of extraordinary freedom and self-discovery. And it’s temporary in a way that teaches you something about your own resilience.
The practical solution: structured social situations. Hostels (even if you’re booking private rooms) are social environments. Free walking tours drop you into a group. Cooking classes, day tours, volunteer activities — anything with a built-in group dynamic serves as an on-ramp to connection.
💡 Pro Tip: One meal alone at a bar counter rather than a restaurant table changes the experience entirely. Bar counters invite conversation in a way that solo restaurant tables don’t.
Meeting People Without Being Weird About It
The art of meeting people as a solo traveler is about creating conditions for natural encounters rather than forcing interactions. Forced friendliness reads as desperation and achieves the opposite of what you want.
Create conditions instead: Go to places where conversation happens naturally (cooking classes, group activities, hostel common rooms, walking tours, local bars that feel neighborhood-y rather than tourist-y). Be interested in people, not interesting to them. Ask genuine questions. Then let conversations develop or not without attachment to the outcome.
The friendships that last from solo travel happen unexpectedly. The ones you try to engineer usually don’t.
Embracing the Decisions Nobody Makes But You
Here’s what you discover about yourself when nobody else’s preferences are in play: you have extremely specific preferences you didn’t know about. You find out you like getting up at 5am to see a market before anyone else is awake. Or that you’d rather spend a whole afternoon in one gallery than rush through five. Or that you genuinely enjoy eating alone with a book.
These discoveries feel small but they aren’t. They’re the beginning of knowing yourself better. And knowing yourself better makes every subsequent trip — solo or otherwise — more satisfying.
Coming Home Is Harder Than You Think
Reverse culture shock is real. You come home from a solo trip having lived in a state of heightened presence and self-reliance for days or weeks, and then suddenly you’re back in the familiar grooves of your regular life. Some people feel flat. Some feel restless. Some feel, counterintuitively, more lonely at home than they did traveling alone.
This is normal. Give yourself a few days to transition. Write about what you experienced. Look at your photos. Start planning the next trip. The feeling passes, and what remains is something durable: the knowledge that you went, figured it out, and came back changed.
