You land in Mexico City on a Wednesday with nine days ahead of you and nobody's number in your phone. The hotel bar is empty until 10pm, the walking tour turns out to be four couples and a family of five, and the only people you have spoken to since passport control were paid to be polite to you. This is the ordinary shape of a solo trip. It is also why the apps on your phone do more work abroad than they ever do at home, and why picking the wrong one costs you a week of swiping through the same 40 profiles.
Dating Apps to Use When Traveling Solo
.JPG "Consulting the map may lead you to your destination. Using a dating app may lead you to the one")
Tinder
Tinder remains the largest pool in almost every city you will land in, with roughly 60 million monthly active users and 8.9 million paying subscribers in 2025. Nothing else on this list gives you that many people to work with. In a city where you know nobody, the app with the most people on it produces the most matches, even at a lower quality per match.
The feature that matters for travel is Passport, which sets your location to any city in the world before you arrive. Two or three days of pre-arrival messaging turns a cold first night into a scheduled drink, and it also lets you find out that a city is dead for your type before you have paid for the flight. Passport is paid, bundled into Tinder Plus and the tiers above it, starting around €22 per month. Tinder's active user count fell 9% during 2025, so the pool in smaller cities is thinner than the headline number suggests.
Bumble
Bumble has around 50 million active users and handles travel through a Premium feature called Travel Mode. You set a destination, your profile shows locals that you are visiting, and the setting lasts 7 days with the option to extend or switch it off early. Premium costs $27.99 to $54.99 per month depending on the plan, and in some regions you can pay for a single use with 5 Bumble Coins.
The structural quirk is that women message first and matches expire in 24 hours. On a short trip that deadline works in your favor, because nothing stays in the queue for a week going nowhere. The same rule punishes anyone who treats the app as a background task, so plan to check it twice a day for the length of the trip.
Happn
Happn matches you with people whose physical paths crossed yours, which sounds gimmicky until you use it in a walkable city. In Lisbon or Paris, where you cover several neighborhoods on foot in a day, the app fills with people who were genuinely in the same market or on the same metro line an hour ago. The conversation has a natural opening because you were both somewhere specific, and an opening line about a place beats an opening line about a photograph almost every time.
It performs poorly in resort towns, sprawling cities, and anywhere you move by car. If your trip is a beach and a hotel shuttle, skip it and put the storage on your phone to better use.
Feeld
Feeld has grown fast among travelers and long-stay remote workers, partly because matching is built around destinations and lifestyle compatibility, so the pool extends well past a 5 km radius. The culture on it is more open about what people actually want from a short stay, which saves both sides the three days of guessing that other apps require.
Conversations there often last several days before anyone meets, which puts real weight on text flirting. People who write well do better on Feeld than people with better photographs, and on a trip with a fixed end date, that is a useful filter to have working in your favor.
Hinge
Hinge has no travel mode. You can change your city manually and free of charge, but you cannot pick a distant location from your couch the way Passport allows. That makes it the wrong tool for a four-day city break and the right one for a month in Lisbon or a slow winter in Buenos Aires.
The pool has improved sharply. Hinge added close to 50% more monthly active users during 2025 while its rivals shrank, and the prompt-based profiles give you more to work with than a photo grid. Before meeting anyone, run their main photo through a reverse image search. It takes 20 seconds and catches the profiles built from someone else's holiday pictures.
Fairytrail and TourBar
Fairytrail was built for people who move around, and roughly 90% of its users are remote workers or long-stay expats. Everyone on it understands that the other person leaves eventually, which removes an awkward conversation from the front end of every match.
The pool is small, and small pools attract a particular kind of trouble. Romance scams follow a recognizable script of fast declarations, a refusal to video call, and eventually a story about a stuck payment or a medical bill. Anyone who cannot spare two minutes for a video call before meeting you is telling you something.
TourBar is somewhere between a travel companion service and a dating app, which suits anyone who wants company for a hike or a museum without deciding in advance what it is. Matches skew older than the swiping apps and the conversations are more practical, since people are often coordinating actual dates and cities.
One practical note applies to every app on this list. You will be logging into all of them on shared connections, and hotel Wi-Fi is far less private than most travelers assume, including networks that ask for a room number and a password. Log in over cellular data when the connection matters.
Which One to Install Before You Fly
Install two. Take Tinder or Bumble for volume, then add whichever of the others matches the trip you booked, Happn for a walkable city, Hinge for a long stay, Feeld or TourBar for a trip where you have no particular agenda. Set your location two days before you fly so the first conversations are already moving when you land, and keep the notifications off during the hours you planned to spend somewhere specific.
What you want the app to produce matters more than which one you install. Solo travel keeps growing because people want full control over their own itinerary, and an app that fills every evening with strangers hands that control back to strangers. Three evenings out of a week is roughly where the apps stop adding to a trip and start replacing it. So how many of yours do you actually want to give to someone you have not met yet?
