How to Use Facebook Groups to Meet Other Travelers

Remember Couchsurfing? It was a website that allowed you to hang out with locals (for free) and always have tons of events and meetings to attend no matter where you are in the world. It was one of the best ways to meet locals and travelers on the road. It was one of my favorite sites.

Almost everyone on the team here has used it extensively over the years. My Content Director, for example, was not only an avid traveler who went on multi-day trips with strangers because of Couchsurfing, but was also a host, and was even featured in their calendar for one year!

I used it to stay in places like Copenhagen, London, Oxford, Munich, Broome, Paris, Osaka, Athens, and so on and so forth. I mean, I loved it. I met people in cities like Lyon just to hang out, I did meetings in NYC, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and many other places.

But since the site started charging around 2013, and then set up a paywall during the pandemic, fewer and fewer people have used it. These days, it’s the former shell.

While I was researching the latest edition of my budget travel book (coming out in March 2025!), I also joined Couchsurfing to see how active it was, and even in the biggest city centers, there were few active profiles during the last month. . For example, London showed 229,457 hosts in total but only 896 active hosts in the last six months – and only 496 active within the last month. That’s a big, big difference!

It’s a real shame as Couchsurfing has really changed the way people travel. It was as ubiquitous as the Lonely Planet!

So, with Couchsurfing (and similar websites) pretty much dead, where does one go to meet people now?

Answer: Facebook – which is the last place I could think of, because, of course, it’s Facebook, and most of the young travelers don’t use it as much as TikTok or Instagram. After all, Facebook also has a well-deserved reputation as the place where your aunt posts memes or your crazy cousin rants about racist things.

But, whenever I go on Facebook, I always see posts from all kinds of groups in my feed, there are people looking for travel friends: backpacking Europe, Australia backpacking, digital nomads in (insert destination), find a friend of the tour… the groups go on and on.

I wasn’t suspicious at first, because when I looked deeper into the posts, it always sounded like they were shy guys hitting on little girls and AI generated girl accounts designed to stalk someone. “Hello, I’m Anna from the US who wants to travel, dm me” doesn’t strike me as something the original one can say.

While women-only groups have long been a legitimate way to meet people (Girls Love Travel is one of the most popular), mixed genders have always felt sketchy. But they kept showing up in my feed.

So I checked them carefully to see if they were really spam. While there were a lot of fake profiles and creepy dudes (sorry, guys, but it’s the internet, and there are tons of those), I occasionally met genuine people who seemed interested in meeting others, although they were few and far between.

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

I used the Find a Travel Buddy group when I was in Europe and posted some of my test plans. I received hundreds of replies and direct messages, which puzzled me.

Most of it was spam: people telling me to visit them in India (I post about Europe), people sending me hellos, a few marriage proposals, and other really inappropriate comments. (Side note: when I get those kinds of responses, I can only imagine what it’s like for women, who I often see editing their posts to ask people to stop coming at them. It’s really sad.)

But I got through all the junk and finally found real people to meet. In the end, I met only a few, as my plans changed or theirs changed. But the interaction I had was really good.

I had a great night in Freiburg, Germany, with a group of people, and with an Italian girl and her friends in Amsterdam. Each time, they took me to places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and I met the locals. It was a great way to make new friends and find people to talk to.

Even though you have to wade through a lot of trash, I think these groups are great, especially if you’re traveling alone. Although I don’t have the personality to go on a multi-day trip with a stranger, I loved the ability to meet people as I traveled.

If you’re looking to use them, here are some suggestions for reducing (but not eliminating) garbage responses:

1. Be specific about where you are going and when (otherwise, people will spam you with “come visit X!”).
2. Ask respondents to be specific about themselves.
3. Specify what you are looking for (age, type of travel partner, gender, etc.)

My current favorite bands:

From there, safely, I would highly recommend looking at the profiles of the respondents to make sure they are real and only meet in public places. Other than that, enjoy! These groups may not be as easy to use as Couchsurfing was, but at least there is something these days to help you meet locals and other travelers. I am now a believer and a fan of these bands and will definitely use them more on future trips.