Is Solo Travel Lonely? What Eating Alone in Three Countries Taught Me

Yes, solo travel can be lonely, but far less often than your fears suggest, and almost never in the way you imagine. I've felt it many times myself. It's hardest in destinations built around couples, where people feel less open to mingle and the sight of couples everywhere makes your solitude feel more visible. I've sat in exactly that seat, in Sorrento, with a lobster pasta I'd waited five years to taste. Here's what eating alone in three countries taught me about the difference between being alone and being lonely, and how a formerly shy introvert learned to close the gap.

The Sorrento Lobster I Waited Five Years to Eat Alone

In 2018, I tasted a heavenly forkful of someone else's lobster pasta at a little restaurant on the port in Sorrento. When we went back the next day so I could order my own plate, they were out of lobster. It's that kind of place, they catch what they catch, and when the lobster is gone, the lobster pasta is gone with it. I left without it, frustrated, and that single taste lodged itself in my memory.

For five years I chased it, ordering lobster pasta wherever it appeared on a menu, hoping to land on that flavour again. Nothing came close, and my budget suffered.

So in May 2023, I went back to Sorrento alone for a weekend, a familiar place to think against, my own meditation retreat set to the rhythm of a bucket list of things I wanted to eat. Top priority: that restaurant on the port, and finally my own plate of heaven.

First evening, I was there, the only woman alone at a table for two, couples queuing to be seated, honeymooners over their meals, and me, FINALLY eating my lobster pasta with a glass of wine. I felt the gaze: how can she be enjoying that so much, by herself? The answer was simple. I was enjoying the food that much. The sea-port view. The comfort of my own thoughts. The victory of finally ordering my own plate, at a far better price than anywhere else I'd tried.

The loneliest-looking moment of my solo travels was also one of the most satisfying, because the discomfort was in the room's assumptions, not in me. It's a question of perspective.

Yes, Solo Travel Can Be Lonely, and Pretending Otherwise Helps No One

Yes, solo travel can sometimes feel lonely, particularly during meals, on transit days, or after saying goodbye to new friends. But most solo travellers find these moments are temporary, and that they get easier as confidence grows.

The loneliness, when it comes, lands in specific and predictable places: dinner somewhere full of couples; the in-between after you've just left wonderful people and the world suddenly feels depopulated; the small ache of seeing something funny or beautiful with no one beside you to turn to. These moments are real. Naming them honestly is the only way to take their power away.

But here's the distinction that changes everything, and it's backed by people who study this for a living. Psychologists draw a hard line between solitude, simply being alone, and loneliness, the distress you feel when there's a gap between the connection you want and the connection you have. As researchers featured on the APA's Speaking of Psychology put it, you can be alone without being lonely, and lonely in a crowded room. Being alone is a situation. Loneliness is a feeling.

Solo travel doesn't make you lonely. An untrained relationship with being alone does, and that can be changed.

Why Eating Alone Feels So Awkward (and Why It's Lonelier in Your Head Than at the Table)

Here's what eight years of solo travel and eating alone in restaurants taught me: in almost every place on earth, nobody actually cares. The waiter doesn't care. The table next to you doesn't care. The story that everyone is silently pitying the woman dining alone is a story you're telling yourself, and you can stop telling it.

The Sorrento dinner was the rare exception, a romantic town where solo diners genuinely stand out. Everywhere else, the attention I feared simply wasn't there. Once I understood that, the in-between moments stopped being something to dread and became something to use.

My real habits at a table for one: I put my earphones in and let myself have a small, private, head-bobbing dance over my food, the world as my own cinematic soundtrack. Or I pull out my phone and plan the next leg of the trip, which turns a “lonely” dinner into a productive one. Or I do nothing at all, and just sit with my own thoughts, which I've learned is its own kind of luxury. [voice-check]

Aloneness is a fact; loneliness is a story. Change the story and the same dinner becomes a pleasure.

Aloneness vs. loneliness: same dinner, two stories

If anything, I've found being alone is more often a conversation opener than a barrier, with the restaurant staff, with locals, with the people at the next table or queuing alongside you for a seat. It removes the barriers and makes you more approachable to the unexpected connections you'd never get behind a table of four.

How to Meet People While Travelling Solo: Let Openness Do the Introducing

If solitude is the skill that makes eating alone pleasant, openness is the one that makes it social whenever you want it to be. And the strange thing about openness is that it compounds, the more visibly open you are, the more connection finds you without your having to chase it. Travelling alone and making friends turn out to be far more compatible than the fear suggests.

Koh Tao, December 2024. I was queuing for a table behind a Dutch girl. When she got hers, she turned around and asked if I wanted to eat together. I said yes, and added that I was actually waiting for a friend I'd met at my diving class, so all the better, we could all eat together. Three solo travellers who'd been strangers hours earlier, sharing a table. I wasn't even alone that night, and connection still multiplied, simply because none of us was closed off.

Ninh Binh, Vietnam, February 2025. I walked past a café where a couple sat at a table, chairs on one side, a bench on the other, and on the bench, two tiny puppies. I started stroking one while still standing. How cute, that was the whole opening line. We got talking about the puppies, and then I asked if I could sit with them and eat there, puppies and all. They said yes.

Chiang Mai, one morning: a much-loved brunch place with no free tables, and a woman eating by herself. I asked if I could join her. She said yes, and we spent the meal in conversation. I've started doing this more and more, asking politely, with a smile, in places where solo travellers gather, and not once has anyone said no.

Connection on the road isn't about courage in the dramatic sense. It's about being visibly open, and letting the smile, the question, the shared table do the work.

Is Solo Travel Lonely for Introverts? I Was a Shy Kid Who Found Out.

I want to be honest about who's telling you this, because it changes what the advice is worth. I was not a naturally outgoing child. I was shy, genuinely, painfully so, and well into adulthood I'd have called myself an introvert without hesitation.

Solo travel is what changed that. Not overnight, and not because some hidden extrovert was waiting to burst out. It changed because being alone in a new place keeps handing you small, low-stakes chances to be open, ask the question, take the empty seat, say how cute about the puppies, and each one you take makes the next one easier. Once you've done it and seen that it went well, even when there was a ridiculous moment along the way, it still went well, the world is yours. Today I can walk into a room where I know no one and feel fine. That was not me before. It was built, one shared table at a time.

This matters because so much advice about meeting people while travelling is written by people for whom it was always easy. If that's not you, I want you to know the capacity is learnable. The shyness isn't a disqualification, it's just the starting line. And this is what I love about solo travel: it teaches you skills in everything you do, and the reward is immediate. In this case, connection and a shared moment, one that sometimes lasts a meal, and sometimes turns into years of friendship.

You don't have to already be the person who talks to strangers. Solo travel is one of the few things that reliably turns you into them.

How to Eat Alone Without Feeling Lonely

Everything above, distilled into the tactics I actually use. None of it requires being an extrovert, only a willingness to try the next small thing.

• Pick places built for company. Restaurants with big communal tables, hostel kitchens, cooking classes, food markets, anywhere strangers are already seated side by side lowers the bar for a hello.
• Smile first, ask second. A genuine smile does most of the work. A simple question about what someone's eating, or whether you can join, opens almost every door, asked politely and with a smile, I've never been turned down.
• Offer to share when a place is full. No free tables and someone's sitting alone? Ask to join them. The full restaurant is your excuse, and it's a good one.
• Bring a soundtrack for the solo nights. Earphones and a playlist turn a table for one into your own private scene. Let yourself enjoy it.
• Use the in-between hours on purpose. Plan tomorrow's leg, write, or simply think. A meal alone is an hour that belongs entirely to you.
• Signal that you're open. Most connection while travelling comes down to looking approachable rather than buried in a screen. Openness compounds, the more you show it, the more finds you.

The worst case of asking is a no, and a no costs you nothing with someone you'll likely never see again. The upside is a dinner companion, or a friend for the years to come.

Does Solo Travel Get Less Lonely Over Time?

Yes, markedly. The first solo dinner is the hardest, because you're convinced everyone's watching. By the tenth, you know they aren't. Feeling lonely while travelling is largely a beginner's experience: as your confidence and your openness grow, the lonely moments shrink to the occasional transit day or the ache of a goodbye, and even those start to feel less like loneliness and more like the natural punctuation of a life full of people worth missing.

Solo travel loneliness fades with practice. What replaces it is a confidence that follows you home.

The easiest way to make solo travel less lonely isn't becoming more outgoing, it's finding people already on the same journey. Through Just Gutsy, solo travellers meet up every week in cities worldwide, share experiences, and turn solo moments into shared adventures.