In a survey of 1,000 travellers conducted in January 2025 for a European hotel chain, 26.2% said they had fallen in love on a trip, and 16.4% of those romances turned into long-term relationships. The same survey found that most of these meetings happened in ordinary places, such as the shared rooms of a hotel or a beach on the first afternoon.
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A woman travelling alone chooses most of those places when she books the trip.
Common rooms and communal tables
A quarter of the people in that survey, 25.6%, met their holiday romance in the common areas of the place they were staying. Another 20.6% met the person on the way there or on arrival, on the plane or the train, and 71.8% said they felt chemistry within the first few days.
A hotel with no bar and no shared breakfast gives a solo guest few chances to talk to anyone. A small guesthouse with one long breakfast table, or a hostel with private rooms and a busy common area, brings the same guests together every morning and evening.
Walking tours and cooking classes offer the same thing during the day, since they last a few hours and the group often goes for a drink afterward. Staying three or four nights in one place helps too, since a guest who stays four nights sees the same faces at breakfast four times, while one who changes towns every day starts over each morning.
Chance meetings in transit
In a OnePoll survey of 2,000 Americans who had travelled abroad, commissioned by a tour operator, 30% said they had dated someone they first met on a plane, and 33% said they had had a holiday romance.
A long train journey or a ferry crossing has the same effect as a shared table, because two people are seated together with nothing else to do for several hours. Seat choice matters on those journeys, and a dining car or a ferry lounge offers far more conversation than a reserved seat with headphones in.
In that survey, 20% of respondents thought solo travel made it easier to meet people. A traveller with a companion is approached less often and approaches others less often.
Character on display during a trip
Travel shows a person’s habits faster than a series of planned dinners at home. A missed connection or a late check-in puts everyone under mild pressure, and people behave in front of strangers in ways they might hide on a first date.
Those moments make it easier to spot a high-value man and to rule out the ones who are pleasant only when things go smoothly. The man who stays polite to a stressed receptionist and turns up on time for a 6am boat is showing the traits he would bring home.
Road friendships
In the same OnePoll survey, 77% of respondents said they had made lifelong friends while travelling, at an average of 4 new friends per trip, and 23% said they had met their future spouse while travelling. Asked what worked best for meeting people, 31% named taking part in activities, and 28% named group tours and events run by hotels.
A friend made on the second day of a trip often knows the town better by the fourth, and invitations to a dinner or a local’s birthday tend to come through those contacts, so friends made early introduce others. A woman travelling alone who says yes to a few of those invitations meets far more people than one who plans every evening herself.
Group tours and their gender balance
Group tours are a sensible way to see a difficult region safely, but the passenger lists are heavily female. A 2025 NBC News report on women planning to holiday alone found that 64% of G Adventures clients were women, that 71% of solo clients at the Virtuoso travel network were women, and that about 85% of solo travellers with Road Scholar, which serves people over 50, were women.
One walking and cycling operator, Macs Adventure, reported a smaller gap, with women making up 56% of its solo bookers in 2024. A woman who books a large group tour to meet men will usually find herself among other women.
The tour still has value as a base. It supplies company for the long days, and the free evenings in each town are the time to go out to places where locals and other travellers mix.
Activities with more men
Some activities have a male majority, and booking them changes the balance of the people around a solo traveller.
Scuba diving is one example. In 2024, 60% of PADI certifications went to men, and men make up 80% of diving professionals, even after the training agency started a diving initiative aimed at women in 2015.
A multi-day open water course means several mornings on one boat with a small, fixed group.
Among travellers in the 2025 survey who had fallen in love while travelling, 46.2% met the person on a beach holiday and 21.8% on a city trip. Adventure and active holidays accounted for 9.2%, and business trips and cruises for less than 4% each.
Safety on a first date abroad
Meet a man from the road in a public place, preferably during the day for the first meeting, and arrange your own transport there and back, with enough money on hand or a working card to pay for a taxi if the plan changes. Tell the front desk or a friend at home where you are going and when you expect to return, and keep the name of your accommodation to yourself until you know the person better.
Sharing your live location with one trusted person for the length of the date costs nothing and can be switched off afterward.
The UK Foreign Office’s travel advice for Turkey, for example, has a section on drink and food spiking and warns that food or drinks offered by strangers could be spiked. The Foreign Office also expanded its methanol poisoning advisory in late 2025 to cover 27 destinations, and it advises travellers to buy only sealed drinks from licensed venues and to avoid pre-mixed cocktails and drinks served in buckets or jugs.
Order drinks from the bar yourself, keep them in sight, and leave early if anything tastes wrong or the other person pushes to move somewhere private.
A question for the next booking
For each night of the trip, where will you be at 7pm, and who else will be in the room? A private hotel room with a room-service dinner means nobody.
A shared breakfast table or a diving boat means several people with time to talk, met without any effort beyond the booking. Which of those evenings will the next reservation lead to?
