How to Use Facebook Groups to Meet Other Travelers

remember couch rideThis website allowed you to stay with locals (for free) and always had a ton of events and meetups to attend wherever you were in the world. This site was one of the best ways to meet locals and travelers while traveling. It was one of my favorites.

Almost everyone on the team here has used this site a lot over the years. For example, my content manager is not only an avid traveler who has gone on multiple multi-day trips with strangers thanks to Couchsurfing, but he’s also a host, and was even featured in a calendar they made one year!

I’ve used it for staycations in places like Copenhagen, London, Oxford, Munich, Brum, Paris, Osaka, Athens, etc. I mean, I loved it. I’ve met people in cities like Lyon just to hang out, and I’ve had meetups in New York, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and many other places.

But since the site started charging users in 2013, and then imposed a payment system during the pandemic, fewer and fewer people have been using it. These days, the site is not what it used to be.

While searching for the latest version of My book on budget travel (Coming in March 2025!) I rejoined Couchsurfing to see how active it was, and even in the largest urban centers, there were only a few dozen active profiles over the previous month. For example, London showed 229,457 total hosts but only 896 active hosts over the past six months — and only 496 active over the past month. That’s a pretty big difference!

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

So, with Couchsurfing (and sites like it) largely extinct, where does one go to meet people now?

Answer: Facebook — which is honestly the last place I would have thought of, because it’s Facebook, and most younger 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 stuff.

But whenever I log into Facebook, I keep seeing posts from all sorts of groups in my news feed, with people looking for travel buddies: backpackers in Europe, backpackers in Australia, digital nomads in (insert destination), finding a travel buddy… the list of groups goes on and on.

I was skeptical about them at first, because when I looked deeper into the posts, I always felt like they were just corrupt guys flirting with young girls and AI-generated girl accounts designed to trap someone. “Hi, I’m Anna from the US and I want to travel, DM me” doesn’t sound like anything to me. actual As the person says.

While female-only groups have long been a legitimate way to meet people (Girls love to travel. Being one of the most popular images, the gender-mixed images always seemed a bit off. But they kept popping up in my news feed.

So, I checked them out more carefully to see if they were really just spamming. While there were a lot of fake profiles and annoying guys (sorry guys, but this is the internet, and there are a lot of them), I did occasionally come across real people who seemed generally interested in meeting other people, however few and far between.

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

I have used the set. Find a travel buddy While in Europe I posted some of my test plans, and received hundreds of responses and DMs, which was absolutely overwhelming.

There was a lot of spam: people asking me to visit them in India (I write about Europe), people sending me compliments, a few marriage proposals, and some really inappropriate comments. (Side note: If I get such responses, I can only imagine what it must be like for women, who I often see edit their posts to ask people to stop flirting with them. It’s so sad.)

But I did all this research and eventually found real people to meet. In the end, I only met a few of them, either because my plans or theirs changed. But the interactions I had were really great.

I had a great night in Freiburg, Germany with a group of people, and another with an Italian girl and her friends in Amsterdam. Each time, they took me on a tour of places I would never have seen otherwise, and I got to know the locals. It was a great way to make new friends and find people to talk to.

Although you will have to wade through a lot of trash, I think these groups are great, especially if you are traveling alone. Although I don’t have the personality to go on a multi-day trip with a stranger, I loved being able to meet people while I was traveling.

If you want to use it, here are some suggestions to reduce (but not eliminate) spam responses:

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

My current favorite groups are:

So, for safety’s sake, I highly recommend checking out the profiles of the participants to make sure they are real and only meeting in public places. Otherwise, have fun! These groups may not be as user-friendly as Couchsurfing, but at least there is something these days that helps you meet locals and other travelers. I am now a believer and fan of these groups and will definitely be using them more on future trips.