How do you find a travel partner?

This is like a permanent challenge, unless you marry or partner someone with exactly similar work. I recently started ‘banjaraa’ - which is a socio-nomadic community - working in the grassroots of India and other countries (later of course), based on my experiences of working in the IT as well as non-profit sector.

Do connect. I travel quite a lot. Any means.

A few ideas come to mind:

1. Your laptop, she so sexy.
2. Stalk people.
3. Bring a teddy bear. LOL.

Oh on couchsurfing, there is also this group https://www.couchsurfing.com/groups/travel-companions-around-the-world. I haven’t used it but it is pretty active, though I suspect again mostly by non-working travellers.

I can also highly recommend couchsurfing, I always try to attend some events wherever I go and always meet fun, interesting people. It’s also great for finding people to do short trips with, like weekend trips such as @jellyfish mentioned.

Hostels are of course a no brainer for meeting people, but a typical backpacker is unlikely to make a good travel partner for a digital nomad (although I have met a few nomads in hostels).
Another option which I plan on using more is to stay in coliving spaces. They give you instant access to a community of people and since you are living together, it’s very likely for friendships to form and future travel plans to be made.

I haven’t found (or even looked for) a travel buddy for the longer term, but my preferred approach to finding good company is to stay based in a place for a month or two, make friends with local residents through Couchsurfing and the like, and then go on weekend trips to nearby cities/countries with them. It’s good fun and makes for lasting friendships, and helps me not to get stuck in my AirBnB bored out of my mind during my time off work. But then, I am also only free during weekends – your post suggests that you’re lucky enough to have more time to roam, so your mileage may vary. Either way, Couchsurfing is an absolute treasure trove of excellent people, in my experience.

“Local people I meet” <- That’s the problem!

Locals I hung out with in Chicago, Calcutta, or London are all based in those cities, and were highly unlikely to be interested in travel beyond a quick weekend getaway. I had more luck talking to working travellers (folks who take working vacations every couple of months), but those are harder to find in India.

Here, I suspect a better approach might be to hang out with the tourist crowd, and see where they’re headed next. I suspect my working / traveling lifestyle might be much more compatible with someone on vacation (I can code while they’re getting wasted somewhere) than someone who doesn’t travel at all.

There’s actually a site called TravBuddy.com I’ve been on for a while that has been pretty good!

Try Couchsurfing.org. Reach out and ask people to come out for drinks or coffee or lunch or whatever. You’ll find lots of people with different jobs and schedules and availabilities and interests.

I just use Tinder.

*** JUST JOKING ***

But seriously: I wouldn’t have met my current boyfriend/travel partner if he hadn’t chased someone else to South America (where I was) with Tinder. So I guess Tinder kind of plays into it, lol.

The “Thorn Tree forum” has a section for meeting travel buddies.

And as @mikephilipp mentioned, hostels are a great place to meet like minded travelers!

Hi shefali,

I found it very easy to meet travel buddies within hostels only.
When I am focused on work I like to stay at airbnb and be by myself mostly though. But the most easy way to break the ice, at least for me, were hostels with good common areas where a lot of people hang out. I met people there that traveled several island of thailand along with me.

couchsurfing or craigslist may be good to meet local people - but i didnt try it out so far.
Hope that helps a bit.

Mike