How to meet other travelers using Facebook groups

Remember Couchsurfing? It was a website that allowed you to stay with locals (for free) and there were always tons of events and meetups you could join no matter where you were in the world. It was one of the best ways to meet locals and travelers on your travels. It was one of my favorite sites.

Nearly everyone on the team here has used it heavily over the years – for example, my Director of Content is not only an avid traveller who has taken multiple multi-day trips with strangers using Couchsurfing, but he’s also a host and was even featured on a calendar they created one year.

I used it to stay in many different places, including Copenhagen, London, Oxford, Munich, Bloom, Paris, Osaka, Athens, etc. It was really fun, I met people just to hang out in cities like Lyon, and I also had meetings in New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and many other places.

But since the site started charging users fees around 2013 and then again during the pandemic, fewer and fewer people have been using it, and now it’s a shadow of its former self.

While researching the latest edition of my book on budget travel (due out in March 2025!), I rejoined Couchsurfing to check the activity and found that even the largest metropolitan areas had only a few dozen active profiles in the previous month. For example, in London, the total number of hosts was 229,457, but only 896 hosts had been active in the past six months and only 496 hosts had been active in the past month. That’s a huge difference.

It’s a real shame because Couchsurfing really changed the way people traveled. It was as ubiquitous as Lonely Planet.

So where can you meet people now that Couchsurfing (and similar websites) are all but dead?

Answer: Facebook. Honestly, it’s the last place I would have thought of, because it’s Facebook, and most young travelers don’t use Facebook as much as they do TikTok or Instagram. After all, Facebook has a well-deserved reputation as the place where your aunt posts memes and your crazy cousin rants racist things.

But every time I sign into Facebook, my feed shows posts from different groups, people looking for travel buddies: backpacking in europe, backpacking in australia, digital nomads in (insert destination), looking for travel buddies, the list of groups goes on and on.

I was skeptical at first because after looking more closely at the posts, they just seemed like dirty guys trying to pick up young girls, or AI-generated girl accounts designed to trap someone. “Hi, I’m Anna from the US, looking for travel, DM me” doesn’t sound like something a real person would say.

While all-female groups have long been a legitimate way to meet people (Girls Love Travel is one of the most well-known), mixed-gender groups have always seemed a little dodgy, yet they frequently popped up on my feed.

So I looked more carefully to see if it was really spam, and although there were a lot of fake profiles and creepy guys (sorry guys, but the internet is full of them), occasionally I would come across real people who seemed interested in meeting other people, but they were few and far between.

Are these groups really a good way to meet people? There’s only one way to find out.

I used the “Find a Travel Buddies” group to post some tentative plans for my time in Europe, and I got hundreds of replies and direct messages, which was pretty overwhelming.

Most of it was spam: people asking me to visit India (even though I was posting about Europe), people sending hello, people proposing marriage, really inappropriate comments, etc. (As a side note, I can imagine how women feel when they get replies like this. I often see them edit their posts to ask the guys to stop hitting on them. It’s so sad.)

But I sifted through all the junk and finally found people I could actually meet. In the end, I only met with a few of them because my plans changed or theirs changed. But the interactions I had were truly amazing.

I had some amazing nights out with a group in Freiburg, Germany, and with an Italian girl and her friends in Amsterdam. Each time, they took me to places I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else and I got to meet the locals. It was a great way to make new friends and find someone to talk to.

Even if you have to wade through a lot of rubbish, these groups are great, especially if you’re traveling solo. I’m not the type of person who likes to travel with strangers for days on end, but it was nice to meet people along the way.

If you’re thinking about using them, here are some suggestions to help minimize (but not eliminate) unwanted replies:

Be specific about where you’re going and when (otherwise you’ll get spam “Come to X!”). Ask people who respond to be specific about themselves. Be clear about what you’re looking for (age, type of travel partner, gender, etc.).

My current favorite groups are:

From there, to be on the safe side, I highly recommend looking at the responders’ profiles to make sure they’re genuine and will only meet in public places. Other than that, have fun! These groups may not be as easy to use as Couchsurfing, but at least there’s something here to help you meet locals and other travelers these days. I’m now a believer and fan of these groups and will definitely be using them more on my future trips.