I landed back in my Lisbon apartment on a Tuesday evening, the city still humming with that late-spring warmth that makes the tiles glow pink at sunset. My suitcase sat unopened for two days. Not because I was tired—though I was—but because I needed to let the conversations settle. I had just returned from TBEX Europe 2015 in Barcelona, and the experience left me with something more valuable than any press trip or brand contact: a clear understanding of why the travel community matters, especially for women who travel alone.
TBEX—Travel Blog Exchange—is one of the largest gatherings of travel content creators, PR professionals, and tourism boards in the world. In May 2015, it brought together over 600 people from dozens of countries. For three days, we sat in conference halls, shared tables at lunch, and walked the Gothic Quarter in small clusters. But the real work happened in the margins: the five-minute conversations between sessions, the shared taxi to the airport, the late-night tapas where someone admitted they had been lonely on the road for months before finding this tribe.
That honesty is what I want to reflect on here—not the keynote speakers or the sponsored dinners, but the quiet, practical ways a travel community changes how we move through the world alone.
Why a Travel Community Matters for Solo Women
When I started traveling alone in 2013, I thought self-reliance meant doing everything by myself. I booked hostels without reading reviews, navigated cities with paper maps, and ate dinner with a book propped open so I wouldn't have to make eye contact with anyone. I was proud of my independence, but I was also exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that comes from making every decision alone, from carrying the full weight of logistics, safety, and emotional well-being without a single person to ask, “Does this feel right to you?”
What I learned at TBEX is that community does not weaken solo travel—it strengthens it. The travel community is not a replacement for independence; it is a support system that allows independence to flourish. When you know there are other women who have taken the same train, stayed in the same neighbourhood, or navigated the same visa process, you travel with more confidence and less anxiety.
One evening in Barcelona, I sat on the rooftop of our conference hotel with three other solo female travellers. One had just come from a month in Morocco. Another was planning a solo trip across Central Asia. We swapped practical information—which SIM card worked best in Marrakech, how to handle harassment on overnight buses, the exact phrase to use when a hotel clerk tries to charge you double. That conversation saved each of us hours of research and at least one bad decision. That is the value of community: it compresses experience into actionable knowledge.
The Practical Benefits of Belonging to a Travel Community
I used to think travel communities existed only online—forums, Facebook groups, comment threads. And they do. But the in-person version is different. It creates trust faster. At TBEX, I met women whose blogs I had been reading for months. We already knew each other's voices. Meeting in person just added a layer of accountability and warmth.
Here are the concrete ways I have seen the travel community make solo journeys better, drawn from my own experience and the stories I heard that week in Barcelona:
- Safety through shared knowledge. No one knows the real safety picture of a destination like the women who have just been there. Official travel advisories are broad and often outdated. A community of solo travellers can tell you which neighbourhoods to avoid after dark, which taxi companies are reliable, and which hostels have lockers that actually lock.
- Emotional support on hard days. Solo travel is not always beautiful. Sometimes it is lonely, confusing, or scary. A WhatsApp group of fellow travellers—people who understand what it feels like to cry in a train station in a country where you do not speak the language—can be the difference between cutting a trip short and pushing through to the good part.
- Access to opportunities. Many of the best travel experiences I have had came through recommendations from other women in the community: a homestay in the Azores that never advertises online, a guide in Oaxaca who only works through word of mouth, a walking tour in Lisbon led by a local historian who charges nothing but asks for a donation to a cat shelter. These are not on Google. They live in the collective memory of the community.
- Accountability for slow, intentional travel. When you are part of a community that values substance over checklists, you stop rushing. I noticed this shift in myself after TBEX. I started spending three days in one town instead of one. I started saying no to free press trips that did not align with how I actually wanted to travel. The community reminded me that quality matters more than quantity.
How to Find Your Travel Community (Without Feeling Awkward)
One of the most common questions I get from readers is: “How do I find other solo travellers when I am shy?” I understand the hesitation. Walking into a room full of strangers is hard, especially when you are used to being alone. But the travel community is unusually welcoming, partly because most of us have been the new person in a new city more times than we can count. We know what it feels like to stand at the edge of a conversation, hoping someone will invite you in.
Here is what worked for me, and what I saw work for others at TBEX:
- Start online, but move to real life. Join a Facebook group for solo female travellers or for a specific destination you love. Read the posts for a week. Then comment on one. Then send a private message to someone whose travel style resonates with you. Suggest a coffee if you are in the same city. Most people say yes.
- Attend a conference or meetup. TBEX is the largest, but there are smaller gatherings—Women in Travel Summit, TravelCon, local meetups organised by travel bloggers in your region. You do not have to be a professional blogger to attend. Many conferences welcome passionate travellers who simply want to learn and connect.
- Use co-working and co-living spaces. In Lisbon, I have met more solo travellers at co-working spaces like Second Home and co-living houses like Selina than anywhere else. These spaces are designed for connection. You can work next to someone for a week and gradually build a friendship without the pressure of a formal introduction.
- Be the one who reaches out. At TBEX, I made a point of sitting next to someone new at every meal. Sometimes the conversation was awkward. Sometimes it led to a friendship that continues to this day. The key is to remember that most people are also hoping someone will talk to them. You are doing them a favour by breaking the ice.
What I Carried Home from Barcelona
The morning I left Barcelona, I had breakfast with a woman from Melbourne who had been travelling solo for two years. She told me about a ritual she started: every time she meets another solo female traveller, she writes down one piece of advice they gave her and tucks it into her journal. By the time she goes home, she will have a small archive of wisdom from women she met in hostels, on trains, and at conferences like TBEX.
I started doing the same. That journal now holds notes from women I met in Barcelona: the name of a guesthouse in Chefchaouen run by a single mother, the exact bus number from Split to Dubrovnik that runs along the coast, the phrase “poco a poco” (little by little) that one woman uses to calm herself when solo travel feels overwhelming.
This is the importance of the travel community. It is not about followers or brand deals or building a platform. It is about the small, practical, deeply human exchanges that make solo travel not just possible, but joyful. It is about knowing that when you are alone in a foreign city, there is someone—many someones—who has been there before and is willing to tell you the truth about it.
The solo journey is still yours. You still book the ticket, pack the bag, and step onto the train alone. But the community is there, waiting at the other end of a message or across a conference table, ready to share what they know. All you have to do is show up.
If you are curious about how other solo women have built their lives around travel, I recommend reading A Day in the Life of Gloria Apara (Nomadic Chica) in 2015—her story is a beautiful example of finding community while maintaining independence. And for a deeper look at how online conversations shaped my own understanding of solo travel, What a 2015 Comment Thread Taught Me About Solo Travel explores the unexpected connections that happen in comment sections and how they can feel just as real as a face-to-face meeting.
