<\/p>\n
Remember Couchsurfing<\/a>? It was a website that allowed you to stay with locals (for free) and always had a plethora of events and meetups you could attend no matter where you were 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.<\/p>\n Pretty much everyone on the team here used it a lot over the years. My Director of Content, for example, was not only an avid traveler who went on multiple multi-day trips with strangers thanks to Couchsurfing, but he was also a host, and he was even featured in a calendar they made one year! <\/p>\n I used it to stay in places like Copenhagen, London, Oxford, Munich, Broome, Paris, Osaka, Athens, and so forth and so forth. I mean, I loved it. I met people in cities like Lyon just to hang out, did meet-ups in NYC, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and so many other places. <\/p>\n But ever since the site started charging around 2013, and then instituted a paywall during the pandemic, fewer and fewer people have used it. These days, it\u2019s a shell of its former self. <\/p>\n While researching the latest edition of my book on budget travel<\/a> (coming out in March 2025!), I rejoined Couchsurfing to see how active it was, and even in the largest metropolitan centers, there were barely a few dozen active profiles within the previous month. For example, London showed 229,457 total hosts but only 896 active hosts in the last six months \u2014 and only 496 active within the last month. That\u2019s a big, big difference!<\/p>\n It\u2019s a real shame as Couchsurfing really changed the way people traveled. It was as ubiquitous as Lonely Planet! <\/p>\n So, with Couchsurfing (and similar websites) pretty dead, where does one go to meet people now? <\/p>\n Answer: Facebook \u2014 which is honestly the last place I would have thought, because, well, it\u2019s Facebook, and most younger travelers don\u2019t use it as much as TikTok or Instagram. After all, Facebook also has a well-deserved reputation as the place your aunt posts memes or your crazy cousin rants about racist stuff. <\/p>\n But, whenever I sign into Facebook, I keep seeing posts from all sorts of groups in my feed, with people looking for travel buddies: backpacking Europe, backpacking Australia, digital nomads in (insert destination), find a travel buddy\u2026the list of groups goes on and on. <\/p>\n I was skeptical of them at first, because when I took a deeper look at the posts, it always felt like they were just sleazy guys hitting on young girls and AI-generated girl accounts designed trap someone. \u201cHi I\u2019m Anna from US looking to travel dm me\u201d doesn\u2019t strike me as something an actual<\/em> person would say. <\/p>\n While female-only groups have been a legitimate way to meet people for a long time (Girls Love Travel<\/a> being one of the most famous), the mixed-gender ones always felt a little sketchy. But they kept popping up in my feed. <\/p>\n So I looked into them more carefully to see if they really were spammy. While there were many fake profiles and creepy dudes (sorry, guys, but it\u2019s the internet, and there are tons of those), sometimes I did come across real people who seemed generally interested in meeting others, however few and far between they were. <\/p>\n Are these groups really a good way to meet people? There was only one way to find out. <\/p>\n I used the group Find a Travel Buddy<\/a> while in Europe<\/a> and posted some of my tentative plans. I got hundreds of responses and direct messages, which was pretty overwhelming.<\/p>\n A lot of it was spam: people telling me to come visit them in India (I\u2019m posting about Europe), people sending me hellos, a few marriage proposals, and some really inappropriate comments. (Side note: if I get those kinds of responses, I can only imagine what it\u2019s like for women, who I often see edit their posts to ask people to stop coming on to them. Quite sad.) <\/p>\n But I waded through all the junk and eventually found real people to meet up with. In the end, I only met a few of them, as either my plans shifted or theirs did. But the interactions I had were really great. <\/p>\n![\"Nomadic](\"https:\/\/media.nomadicmatt.com\/2024\/mattfriendssmall.jpeg\")