It is the 5th evening of a 2-week trip, and you are eating with a Canadian architect who stood next to you at a market cooking class on Tuesday. Neither of you planned it. You ran into each other at a bakery near the hotel on Thursday morning, compared notes on the class, and agreed to try a restaurant a local had recommended. The trip itself went ahead as booked, with the museums visited and the coast road driven. The dinner happened because you kept turning up in a small number of places.
Chance meetings abroad often follow that pattern. They come from repeated contact in ordinary settings, and they need very little planning beyond choosing where to spend the days. Meeting someone while traveling does not have to mean actively searching for a date. It can happen naturally through shared activities, familiar places, and conversations that develop over time.
Proximity and Repeat Encounters
Stay 4 nights in a single neighbourhood instead of 4 cities in 4 nights. Returning to a single café each morning or taking a class that meets twice puts familiar faces in front of a visitor more than once, and a second or third sighting is often when a nod turns into a conversation.
Leon Festinger and his colleagues studied the effect in research on friendships among students living with their families in the Westgate West housing complex at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in 1950. Residents had been assigned their units, so nobody had chosen their neighbours. Distance still predicted who became friends. Among residents living next door to each other, approximately 41% of possible friendship choices were made, compared with 22% for those 2 doors apart and 10% for those at opposite ends of a corridor.
The Place of Apps on a Trip
Online dating had become the most common way heterosexual couples in the United States met by the late 2010s. A 2019 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld, found that about 39% of heterosexual couples in the United States who met in 2017 had met online, up from 22% in 2009. Meeting online had overtaken meeting through friends as the leading route around 2013.
On holiday, dating apps can take over the evenings. Swiping in a hotel room at 10 p.m. is time spent away from the place itself. Someone who wants an app on the trip but has grown tired of the one on the phone at home can compare Hinge alternatives before leaving, since some allow a location to be set before arrival. Messages that start a week early also leave time to get acquainted, although they cannot confirm that a match is who they claim to be. A fixed limit keeps it contained. A single evening of messages, or half an hour before dinner, leaves the rest of the day for the trip that was actually booked.
For a first meeting arranged through an app, choosing a public place and letting someone trusted know the plans adds a sensible layer of safety without making the meeting feel formal.
Conversation Through Shared Tasks
A 1997 procedure by the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues paired strangers for 45 minutes of increasingly personal questions. The pairs reported more closeness afterwards than pairs given small-talk tasks for an equal length of time. Its list of 36 questions reached a much larger audience in 2015, when Mandy Len Catron described trying them in a Modern Love essay for The New York Times. Aron has since said the questions were built to create closeness between 2 people in a short time, which he treats as separate from love.
Few people on holiday will work through a list of questions with a stranger. Activities with a shared task supply a milder version. At a cooking class or on a guided hike, there is a reason to talk and a subject to talk about, and the conversation tends to move from the task to each other at its own pace, with none of the pressure of a first date.
Group trips work well when the group stays together for more than a day. A single 3-hour walking tour may produce little more than a pleasant exchange. A 3-day trek or a week on a sailing boat puts 10 or 12 people around one table each evening.
Social Running Clubs
Running clubs have become one of the increasingly popular ways to meet people in a new city. Strava’s 2024 Year in Sport report recorded a 59% increase in running club participation worldwide, and 58% of its survey respondents said they had made new friends through fitness groups. Nearly 1 in 5 Generation Z respondents had been on a date with someone they met through exercise.
A social run lasts about an hour and often ends at a café. For a visitor, it provides a group of local people and a conversation that starts on equal terms, and it asks for nothing beyond a pair of trainers. Joining early in a stay may also mean seeing familiar runners again at another session, which echoes the effect found at Westgate. In Washington, however, singles began joining run clubs to date after social media videos promoted them for that purpose, and club organisers there say some women have stopped attending because of unwanted attention. Joining to run, and letting any conversation follow from the running, avoids that problem.
Accommodation Choices
Accommodation affects how many people a visitor meets without trying. Hostelworld’s 2025 State of Solo Travel Report found that 58% of surveyed solo travellers wanted to meet new people, up from 43% the year before, and 27% said they hoped for what the report called falling in love, with a place, a person or a moment. Hostels with a shared kitchen or a common room can make meeting other travellers easier.
Small guesthouses with a shared breakfast table offer a quieter version. Large hotels may offer fewer spontaneous encounters when guests rarely see each other outside the lift, although properties with organised activities can be more social. Splitting a stay helps, with the first 3 nights in a family-run guesthouse and the rest in a hotel, so the early days of the trip have a social start.
Realistic Expectations for a Short Stay
A connection made abroad is often a short one. It can still be good company for a few evenings, and occasionally it continues by message after the flight home. Treating it as a possible addition to the trip keeps the itinerary intact if nothing comes of it.
Jeffrey Hall, a communication researcher at the University of Kansas, estimated in 2018 the hours it takes to make a friend. Adults need about 50 hours together to move from acquaintances to casual friends, 90 hours to become friends and more than 200 hours to become close friends, according to his estimates. His figures came from a survey of 355 adults who had recently moved to a new city and a second group of 112 new university students. Time spent working together counted for less than time spent socialising.
The research concerns friendship rather than romantic relationships, but it illustrates how shared time can help people get to know one another. A 2-week trip may contain nowhere near 50 waking hours with any single new person unless they decide to spend their days together. A 3-day trek adds up to more hours in company than a fortnight of passing each other at breakfast.
The Bakery on Thursday
The dinner in the opening scene depended on a class booked for its own sake and a bakery visited twice. Nothing in that sequence required a plan to meet anyone. A visitor who stays longer in fewer places and books activities with other people in them will have more opportunities to meet people than one who treats every evening as a search, and most of the museums will still get seen.
