Business Opportunities: Solo Travel

People love traveling. Nowadays, more people go traveling more frequently than ever before.

Some travel with their friends, families, and loved ones. Others enjoy solo traveling. In our community-discovery process, we were quite surprised to find that the SoloTravel community is growing steadily:

The subreddit r/SoloTravel grew ~50% over the last 12 months, now counting 1.9m members. Here’s what we found in solo travel communities:

We hope you enjoy this report on business opportunities around Solo Travel and we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

🧳 SoloTravel Destinations

Problem: Finding the best destinations, hostels, bars, etc. for solo travelers takes time.

Compared to other forms of traveling, planing solo travels has some specificities. A solo travel itinerary needs to consider climate, culture, food, as well as hostels, bars, restaurants, and areas of cities where solo travelers can meet other people. It also needs to consider limiting factors like public transportation and budget. Finding the right information for all of this takes time: one needs to pull data from different sources such as blogs, books, vlogs, travel groups, and online communities. Or one could hire an expensive travel agency. Both solutions are suboptimal. This might work better:

Solution: Nomad List for solo travelers.

Nomad List is a platform and community for digital nomads. Nomad List “finds you the best places in the world to live, work and travel as a remote worker. Every second, it collects millions of data points on thousands of cities around the world, from cost of living, temperature to safety. With that data, Nomad List gives you an idea of where it’s best for you to go.” What’s special about Nomad List is that “all the data is refreshed in real-time based on user input.” (source)

One could build a similar solution for solo travelers: A platform for finding the best travel destinations for solo travelers, co-created by a community of solo travelers. The platform would feature a wide range of information, quick and authentic recommendations, individualization, and a community of like-minded people – all in one place.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Meeting travelers and locals

Problem: Solo travelers look for others to connect with.

While some solo travelers prefer to stay solo, others would love to connect with fellow solo travelers and share the journey. We often read posts of solo travelers complaining about feeling lonely, looking to meet people in their area, or for people to join their journey. One could help them do that with:

Solution: Social app for solo travelers.

Some people requested alternatives to the existing ways of meeting people. Many would use Tinder and Bumble but complain about having to explain that they’re not out for dating but just meeting people (and that nobody uses BumbleBFF). Others shared that they would go to Couchsurfing meetups, but that those used to be better. Building an app that better supports solo travelers to connect with others may be an interesting opportunity.

📝 Sharing travel experiences

Problem: People want to learn from other solo travelers’ experiences.

By far the most upvoted posts in solo travel online communities were people sharing their solo travel experiences, some of them getting more than 1.8k upvotes. They love reading exciting stories, lessons learned, and guides about solo traveling. Passionate solo travelers could build a business around this demand by creating:

Solution: Quality content in a blog or newsletter.

There’s one huge blog in this space with 250k+ followers: solotraveler. One could start a similar business. We would approach it like this: simply start with a blog or newsletter. One tried and true strategy for finding content that works is to search communities (like r/SoloTravel) for high-performing content and put your own spin on it. Once you’ve built an audience, you can expand your business by offering solo travel tours, paid content, travel gadgets, and so on.

We’ve created a competitor research report on the Solo Travel space. If you’re interested in getting access, please send us an email: moritz@communityvalidated.co