Handling Loneliness on Solo Trips as a Woman

The Thing Nobody Warns You About Solo Travel

Every solo travel article tells you it will change your life, build your confidence, make you feel free. What fewer articles tell you is that around Day 3 — or Day 7, or Day 2 of the second week — you might sit in a beautiful restaurant in a beautiful city, surrounded by people eating and laughing and talking to each other, and feel a wave of loneliness so acute it is almost physical. You might look at your phone. You might consider texting someone who would not understand. You might wonder whether you made a mistake.

You didn’t make a mistake. What you are feeling is real, it is normal, and it is survivable — and the fact that it arrives doesn’t mean solo travel is wrong for you. It means you are a human being who has temporarily separated yourself from your usual social network and is experiencing the predictable emotional consequence of that separation. The experience of loneliness in solo travel is so universal that researchers who study the psychology of travel have a name for it: “solo travel shock,” a temporary emotional dip that typically occurs in the first week or after a transition between destinations.

This guide is a direct, practical companion for those moments. It covers why loneliness happens in solo travel, how to distinguish passing loneliness from a more serious mental health signal, the most effective strategies for managing it in real time, and the apps and communities that provide genuine human connection on the road.

Key Takeaway: Loneliness on a solo trip is not a sign that you are doing it wrong. It is a sign that you are doing something genuinely challenging — and the strategies in this guide will help you move through it rather than around it.

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Why Loneliness Happens on Solo Trips

Understanding the mechanics of solo travel loneliness helps de-mystify it and reduces the additional suffering of feeling confused or ashamed about feeling lonely.

The social context removal. Your ordinary life has an ambient social structure — coworkers, neighbors, regular customers at your coffee shop, the rhythm of familiar interactions that provide low-level social contact throughout the day. When you travel solo, this ambient structure disappears overnight. You are in a new environment where no one knows you, no one has existing context for who you are, and every social interaction requires deliberate initiation. This is stimulating in some ways and exhausting in others, and the exhaustion can manifest as loneliness.

The comparison problem. Travel environments are heavily populated by couples, families, and groups of friends — people who are visibly connected to each other, laughing at shared jokes, coordinating over maps. As a solo traveler, you are surrounded by evidence of connection while experiencing its temporary absence. This contrast is one of the strongest triggers of solo travel loneliness, and it is structural, not a reflection of anything wrong with you.

The freedom fatigue. Paradoxically, one source of solo travel loneliness is the relentlessness of choice. When there is no one else to share decisions, every choice — where to eat, what to see, when to rest, whether to go left or right at this intersection — is yours alone. This freedom is exhilarating in theory and occasionally exhausting in practice. The absence of someone to say “I don’t care, you choose” or “let’s just go there” is a form of companionship that is easy to undervalue until it is gone.

The significance asymmetry. When something extraordinary happens on a solo trip — a perfect meal, a sunset that stops you in the street, a conversation that feels important — there is no one to turn to and say “did you see that?” The experience is complete in itself but not shared, and the inability to share it can produce a specific, peculiar loneliness: the loneliness of beauty witnessed alone.

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Normalizing Loneliness: What the Data Shows

A 2023 study of solo travelers published in the Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Research found that 72% of solo travelers reported experiencing loneliness at some point during their trip, with the highest rates in the first week and immediately after transitions to new destinations. Critically, the same study found that 89% of those who experienced loneliness also reported that the solo trip was ultimately one of the most meaningful of their lives. Loneliness and value are not mutually exclusive — and the brief, intense loneliness of solo travel is different in kind from the chronic loneliness of social isolation.

The normalizing message: what you feel is what most solo travelers feel. The people who post only the beautiful photos have the same difficult evenings you do. Solo travel’s difficulty is part of what makes it powerful — you are doing something genuinely hard, and the competence and confidence it builds are proportional to that difficulty.

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Immediate Strategies: When Loneliness Hits Right Now

When loneliness arrives — sudden, sharp, right now — here are the strategies that work:

Move your body. The simplest and most reliable intervention. Go for a walk with no destination. Find a park. If you are comfortable, find a public space with ambient human energy — a market, a café terrace, a plaza — and sit in it without an agenda. The physical act of moving through a space and the low-level sensory input of being around people (even strangers, even without interaction) reliably reduces the intensity of acute loneliness within 20 to 30 minutes for most people.

Go somewhere with inherent social infrastructure. A cooking class. A walking tour. A yoga class. A food market with communal tables. These environments provide social contact without requiring you to initiate it from scratch. You are placed in proximity to other people with a shared activity, which is the most natural condition for human connection. Even if you don’t have a meaningful conversation, the experience of being in a social environment reduces isolation.

Call someone who actually knows you. Not to report being lonely (unless you want to), but just to hear a familiar voice. A ten-minute call with a friend or family member who knows your life, your history, and your sense of humor is worth more than any amount of browsing social media. The connection of recognition — being known — is what loneliness is most asking for.

Do something indulgent and non-judgmental. This is not avoidance — it is strategic recovery. Order room service. Take a long bath. Watch a movie in your native language. Read a novel you love. The instinct to push through loneliness by relentlessly pursuing “the travel experience” can compound rather than resolve it. Sometimes the most intelligent response is to rest in comfort and let the feeling pass.

Write about it. Journaling is one of the most consistently effective interventions for emotional distress, and it is particularly suited to solo travel’s specific emotional landscape. Write exactly what you are feeling, without editing or self-censorship. Describe the room you are in. Describe the loneliness itself — what it feels like in your body, what it is telling you, what it would say if it could speak. This is not wallowing; it is processing. The act of putting words around a feeling reduces its intensity and gives you perspective on it.

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Apps and Communities for Real Connection

Technology has genuinely improved the solo traveler’s ability to find connection on the road. These are the tools with a track record:

Meetup: Meetup has active groups in virtually every major city worldwide for travelers, expats, language learners, hikers, book clubs, and dozens of other interest-based communities. The format — a public, organized event with a defined activity — is ideal for solo women: it is low-barrier, safe (public venue, organized group), and produces natural conversation without the pressure of one-on-one social initiation. Search for “travelers,” “expats,” “English-speaking,” or any specific interest at your destination.

Bumble BFF: The “BFF” mode of the Bumble app is designed for platonic friendship matching rather than dating, and it has a substantial user base in most major international destinations. The format (swipe on profiles, match, send a message) is familiar and low-stakes, and it specifically surfaces other women looking for social connection — which is exactly the solo woman traveler’s social need.

Couchsurfing Events: Despite the platform’s decline as a housing network, Couchsurfing’s city-specific meetup events (listed under “Hangouts”) remain active in many cities and are free to attend. These events draw a mix of locals, expats, and travelers and have a built-in openness to newcomers.

Solo Female Travelers (Facebook group): With 3.5 million+ members as of 2026, this is the largest solo women’s travel community online. The destination-specific threads allow you to find other women traveling in your current city or region and connect in advance. The community etiquette is supportive and the response time to “anyone in [city] this week?” posts is often rapid.

Hostel common rooms: If you are staying in a hostel or a guesthouse with communal spaces — even in a private room — the common room is the original solo traveler’s social infrastructure. Bring a book (an invitation to be approached) or a drink, sit in a communal area, and be open. The initiation barrier is almost zero because everyone there is in the same position: traveling, looking for connection, open to it.

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Apps for Staying Connected to Home

WhatsApp: The universal messaging app for international communication, with no per-message cost over WiFi. Keeping a handful of close connections on WhatsApp and maintaining a habit of regular check-ins (not just when you need support) builds a connection to your home life that provides grounding during more difficult travel moments.

Marco Polo: A video messaging app that allows asynchronous video exchange — you record a message, they watch it when they wake up and record back. For solo women traveling in significantly different time zones, this is often more connection-sustaining than scheduled calls.

Telegram: Excellent for group chats; many solo travel communities and women’s travel groups maintain active Telegram channels where members share location, ask questions, and coordinate meetups in real time.

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Journaling as an Active Practice

Journaling is mentioned above as an immediate intervention, but it deserves fuller treatment as a practice that transforms the experience of solo travel over time, not just in difficult moments.

The solo traveler who journals regularly has a record of her trip that is fundamentally different from photographs or social media posts: it captures the interior experience alongside the exterior one. The weather in Lisbon on Tuesday, and also what she was thinking about while sitting in the café. The temple in Kyoto, and also the specific quality of the silence she found there. The dinner alone, and also what it meant to her.

This interior record serves multiple functions. In the short term, writing creates processing distance between experience and emotion — when you write about feeling lonely, you become slightly less lonely and slightly more the observer of loneliness, which is a meaningful shift. Over the longer term, the journal becomes evidence: evidence that you had a rich interior life on this trip, that things happened to you and through you, that the solo trip was not a void but a populated inner landscape.

Practical journaling approaches for solo travel:

• Write for ten minutes every evening before sleep — no minimum length, no formatting requirement, just whatever is present
• Begin with sensory description (what did I see, hear, taste, smell, touch today?) and let it lead wherever it goes
• Include the difficult moments as deliberately as the beautiful ones — the full record is more honest and ultimately more useful than a curated one
• Don’t edit in real time; reread only after the trip

HerTripGuide’s guide to Solo Travel Mental Health covers journaling as part of a broader toolkit for emotional wellbeing on the road.

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When to Pivot: Reading Your Own Signals

Loneliness that comes in waves, peaks, and passes is the normal rhythm of solo travel. Loneliness that is constant, intensifying, and accompanied by other symptoms — inability to enjoy any experience, disrupted sleep, significant changes in appetite, persistent hopelessness — is a different signal and deserves a different response.

Signs that you may need more than a new strategy:

• You have felt genuinely low, not just lonely, for more than three or four days continuously
• Things that normally bring you pleasure — food, music, beauty, movement — feel flat or inaccessible
• You are finding reasons not to leave your room consistently
• You are using alcohol or other substances to manage how you feel
• You are having thoughts of harming yourself

If any of these apply, take them seriously. These are signs that something beyond normal travel loneliness is present, and they deserve support beyond what solo travel strategies can provide.

Practical responses:

• Contact your home country’s embassy or consulate for a list of English-speaking mental health professionals in your destination city
• Contact the International Association for Suicide Prevention for crisis resources by country
• Consider shortening or restructuring your trip — returning home earlier than planned is not failure; it is appropriate self-care
• Tell someone what is happening — a trusted friend, family member, or telehealth therapist

The pivot that isn’t failure: Every experienced solo traveler has had a trip where the right decision was to change the plan — to leave a destination earlier, to find a co-traveler for a leg, to slow down dramatically. The ability to adapt your trip to what you actually need is one of the most important skills in solo travel, and it is available to you regardless of what you paid for the original plan.

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Building a Loneliness Prevention Architecture

The most effective approach to solo travel loneliness is not to wait for it to arrive and then manage it — it is to build a trip architecture that reduces its likelihood and provides resources when it does appear.

Before departure:

• Identify two or three people you can contact at any hour if you are struggling — not to burden them, but because knowing they are available reduces anxiety
• Plan at least one structured social activity at each destination (cooking class, guided tour, yoga class, language exchange meetup)
• Schedule check-in calls with your closest people rather than hoping you will connect spontaneously

During the trip:

• Build in rest days where you are not required to do anything productive or social — days off are not defeat
• Spend at least one meal per day eating out (in a café or restaurant) rather than eating alone in your room, even if you bring a book
• Keep a small gratitude or observation practice — three things you noticed today — as a daily anchor

The social media reality: Social media during solo travel is both a connection tool and a comparison trap. The images of other people’s apparently perfect social lives are algorithmically curated to maximize engagement, not accuracy. Using social media to reach out to specific people (direct messages, comments on friends’ posts) is connection; passively consuming the highlight reel of other people’s apparently better lives while you are feeling lonely is the opposite.

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The Other Side of Loneliness

Here is what experienced solo travelers consistently report about the relationship between loneliness and the quality of the overall experience: the trips where they felt loneliness most acutely were often the ones they remember most clearly and value most highly. Not because loneliness itself is valuable, but because the depth of feeling it represents — the full contact with where you actually are, emotionally and physically — is the same depth that makes beauty beautiful, connection meaningful, and discovery real.

Solo travel without any loneliness would require emotional anesthesia. The capacity for loneliness and the capacity for joy are aspects of the same underlying openness to experience. The solo traveler who closes herself against loneliness also closes herself against the unexpected conversation, the beauty that stops her mid-street, the pride of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and finding her way.

The loneliness passes. What it leaves behind — if you let yourself feel it rather than flee it — is an earned, specific, deeply personal knowledge of your own resilience. That knowledge goes home with you, and it doesn’t expire.

For additional resources on the mental and emotional dimensions of solo travel, see HerTripGuide’s complete guide to Solo Travel and Mental Health and our guide on managing First Solo Trip Anxiety.

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Updated for 2026 with current app recommendations, research citations, and community resources.

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