Travel

Making the decision to go backpacking on your own can seem pretty daunting, even to a seasoned backpacker. On top of this, travelling with someone can really cut down costs on accommodation. One alternative is to find like-minded individuals that are also planning a similar trip so that you can meet up along the way and travel together. With this in mind I ve put together some places where you can find a travel buddy hope this helps!

Travel forums can be a great way to find a potential travel partner. They are often broken down into different locations and it will give you a chance to have a bit of a chat with people first. Here s a list of my favourite travel forums that you can use:

As many of you know, Lonely Planet is one of the largest travel guide companies in the world and gives some superb travel advice, recommendations and ideas to all kinds of travellers. They also have a dedicated area on the forum to finding travel companions and you can find the full thread here .

Gumtree, as some of you may know, are a huge classified ads website. They also have areas to find travel companions that can be really useful. Here s the thread to find UK travel partners you can also find travel buddies from other countries across the globe.

TravBuddy is one of the largest online travel communities that has the sole focus of finding you a travel partner. You can search for the right buddy in a number of different ways, for example, you can search for people going to a specific location, travelling on certain dates or by their demographic. You can get pretty specific here but it s still best that you get to know your travel companion before you leave so that you stand the best possible chance of getting on!

This is another site similar to TraveBuddy. Travel Buddies  is a social network that helps bring together backpackers in order to help you find a travel buddy online. It s free to register and you can search through and chat to different people within the site a great way to quickly find someone who you get on with that you can travel with.

Companions2Travel is another site that is solely focused around finding you a travel buddy. You can take a free trial on the site and search for people by country or go into the message board area to find posts that people have posted up. I haven t used this site before but I noticed a lot of people talking about it on the Trip Advisor forum so it must be pretty good.

All of the above sites can be great for finding a travel buddy and stopping you get lonely on your journeys but there are a few things to remember first:

• Make sure that you have a lot in common with your travel buddy.
• Carefully plan out all of your travel itineraries to make sure that you will both be able to get what you want from your trip.
• Have a chat over webcam so that you can get to know your travel companion a bit better before you leave.
• Meet up before you go away can be a great way to judge if you will get on.
• Agree on a similar budget for your trip this is really important because the last thing you want is to be having to fork out for luxury accommodation when you can t afford it.

Hopefully this has helped you out slightly. If you ve ever found a travel buddy online and then had a great/bad trip with them make sure that you let me know in the comments below I m pretty interested to see how they have panned out for different people!