Group holidays
Spending days cooped up in an overheated minibus with a random assortment of strangers ticking off the sights ought to be a recipe for disaster, and yet some of my happiest travel experiences have been group holidays.
There is an element of luck, of course. No matter how carefully you choose your tour, your companions will make or break the trip. But there are things you can do to reduce the chances of group holiday Armageddon.
Book as late as possible, so you can cross-examine the sales assistant on the make-up of the group. Women tend to outnumber men, but beware the single-sex group. A friend still recalls with a shudder the Nepal trek where the all-female group developed a collective crush on the tour leader.
The more expensive the trip, the older the average age tends to be, but I've been camping at altitude and hiking through deserts with people in their 60s and 70s, whose energy and open-mindedness would put many younger people to shame.
Avoid any tour with "Highlights of" in the title – these tend to involve hours on a bus and a different three-star hotel every night. Active trips are best for bonding. There's nothing like cramming 10 people and a bottle of vodka into a two-man tent during a freak summer snowstorm for creating a sense of bonhomie.
While at first glance many operators seem to offer similar itineraries, they all have a different style and client base, so it's worth doing your research.
For sheer choice, few can compete with Exodus (exodus.co.uk) and Explore (explore.co.uk), who have most of the globe covered.
Some companies specialise in particular destinations. For example, Wild Frontiers (wildfrontiers.co.uk) is strong in Central Asia and Pakistan, while Wilderness Scotland (wildernessscotland.com) reaches parts other tour operators don't.
Similarly, if you have a particular passion or interest, look for a tour operator with expertise in that field. For example, KE Adventure Travel (keadventure.co.uk) is well-respected for its climbing and hiking trips, while Andante Travels (andantetravels.co.uk) is owned and run by archaeologists.
For a real sense of adventure, consider an overland specialist such as Dragoman (dragoman.com) that offers expedition-style trips. And if roughing it is not your style, it may be worth paying a bit more to travel with one of the upmarket specialists, such as Abercrombie & Kent (abercrombiekent.co.uk), Cox & Kings (coxandkings.co.uk) or Bales (balesworldwide.com).
Unless you are a truly sociable soul, cough up for the single room supplement. If money is tight, choose a camping trip so you can at least hide in your own tent at the end of the day. Everyone needs some downtime.
Most importantly, be open-minded. People often cite "meeting different people" as one of the reasons they love travelling. Potentially, the people sharing your trip are no less interesting or "authentic" than the ones you are travelling to the other side of the world to encounter, even if they are dressed head to toe in Peter Storm.
Joanne O'Connor, travel journalist
Hotels
The more people spend on a hotel, the less likely they are to talk to each other. Well-heeled guests want privacy, and staying in a swanky city hotel on your own quickly reduces you to human tumbleweed. At the other end of the scale, HI (Hostelling International, hihostels.com) hostels have always been easy places to meet other travellers. Some are genuinely lovely – such as the Metro YHA, in Melbourne, Australia – and most hold nightly events and outings for guests (the HI-NYC has volunteer-led trips to comedy clubs and to Brooklyn's trendy Dumbo - Down under the Manhattan bridge overpass – district).
Happily, there are several chains of city hotels that manage to be chi-chi, sociable and affordable. Ace Hotels (acehotel.com) in the US have linger-friendly coffee shops and cheap cafes, with room prices that attract people who aren't too posh to chat. The Kimpton hotel chain (also across America, kimptonhotels.com) gets it spot on, with a nightly wine hour guest social. Not just a glass of red and a few peanuts, either: in its San Francisco Triton hotel, we all wore feather boas and had our palms read.
Jennifer Cox, author of Around the World in 80 Dates
Small boutique hotels and B&Bs are often run by eccentrics who like spending time with their guests – maybe over a nightcap, though I've had them introduce me to their friends and take me to parties. This is most likely to happen when there are very few rooms, so the hosts have less work to do and more time for individual guests; and expats tend to be keen to catch up on news from home.
Choose somewhere obviously run by a character (zany decor or a humorous website with personal details about the owners are giveaways) and ring ahead to gauge whether they might supply a social element. Places that treated me as a friend include Vivenda dos Palhaços (£55 per room, vivendagoa.com) in Majorda, Goa, and interior designer David Carter's fabulous 40 Winks (single room £90, 40winks.org) in London, where you get treated to gossip in the garden over G&Ts.
Gemma Bowes, acting travel editor
Camping and backpacking
Last summer, I spent five glorious months cycling around Britain, writing a column for this newspaper. Most nights I camped.
First things first: there is no "saddo" single supplement tax when camping. You usually pay per occupant, so there is actually a "saddo" bonus. Site owners are not surprised that somebody might be travelling on their own through choice and not because of a personality disorder. A good start.
As you walk towards your pitch, fellow campers greet you, usually with a cheery wave and a hearty hello. It's like being in the 1950s. Within minutes someone would come up and inquire as to whether I had everything I needed. This often led to the offer of a cup of tea (I had no stove). Tea would beget beer, beer would often beget burgers and sausages, and company for the evening. This largesse would be repeated in the mornings, with a brew and a bacon sandwich, and tips on good campsites further along the road.
I tried to work out what it is about camping that strips away the guardedness of cities and transforms us into such social animals. It's partly the lack of solid walls, with the sense that, when you sleep in a field with strangers, and can hear the farting and the sighing, the whispered bedtime stories, the trips to the loo in pyjamas, we are all in it together.
Also, camping is a great social leveller. Stripped of the symbols of status, any one of those food donors could have been a millionaire. How would I have been able to tell?
And I also think it has much to do with nature, with waking up to the dimmer switch being gradually tweaked, with the recital of bird song, with the sound of the wind.
Add in the fact that for £10 you can have a view from your flap that you would need to be a millionaire to secure in a hotel, and it's a no-brainer.
Five months on the road. Not a nanosecond of loneliness or feeling of deviance for being alone.
Mike Carter, travel writer and author of Uneasy Rider, a solo motorbike odyssey round Europe
Even if you've only got one or two weeks, it's worth embracing your inner backpacker. Your reward for slinging on a backpack will be a cheap, fun and sociable holiday. There's freedom in tasting the open road for a short trip. Budget flights can take you to and from a linear route. Even in high summer you can decide where you're staying on the day, which means that you can be spontaneous. Making friends of all ages is easy, especially if you travel by train and stay in hostels.
Start by picking a route where you'll meet long-term travellers. Try Berlin to Krakow via Prague or Paris to Barcelona with a few nights in Nice – both possible in a week but better with two – and you'll find backpackers from around the world seeing Europe in a way you might have forgotten. The mix of new friends and great cities means there's no time to notice that you're supposed to be travelling on your own.
Europe is the best place for a short, sharp adventure in the British summer. Goa and Thailand will be cheap, but they'll also be wet and quiet.
Tom Hall of Lonely Planet
City breaks
Meeting hippies, activists and bon viveurs can all make a solo trip to a city more sociable. Daytime is quite easy: there are parks and churches to explore and tours to take. And after the sun sets, you can never really go wrong if you can match art with alcohol.
In New York on Fridays, the Whitney Museum of American Art (whitney.org) partners late openings with a party atmosphere. From there it's a short step to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (metmuseum.org) where on Friday and Saturday evenings, until 31 October, you can appreciate the Big Bambú installation on the roof with a beer in your hand.
In London, galleries in Chelsea allow in all and sundry for their openings and give you wine while you gaze at conceptual art. On the first Thursday of each month, you can have a free guided bus tour of east London galleries with the same approach. Find out more on firstthursdays.co.uk.
One of the most convivial evenings I've had in New York involved learning to make pizza at Pizza a Casa (pizzaacasa.com) on the Lower East Side. Everyone brought wine, and we stayed late to eat the results. In London and Cambridge, Divertimenti (divertimenti.co.uk) also has a selection of cookery classes.
On the right day, in thousands of cities, you can make instant, socially aware friends by renting a bike and taking part in the Critical Mass cycle ride (criticalmass.wikia.com).
Some cities are better than others. Venice is a bit rubbish; Paris is good – and if you're there on a Sunday night, don't miss Jim Haynes's weekly gathering (jim-haynes.com). Last time I went, I ended up in a bar drinking champagne cocktails with a professor of space politics.
Sarah Turner, travel writer
Activities and retreats
Turning up on an activity holiday lets you meet people so passionate about the sport they signed up on their own – just like you. Conversation starts with kit, moves on to training regimes and, after a few beers, you've got a friend for life. Situations can be personally challenging, comfort zones shattered and limits pushed, but there's always inspiration and support.
Take Trek Dirt Series (dirtseries.com/) which offers female-only mountain bike weekends in America, with coaching and the "I can't jump that!" moments that progress you way faster than chasing lads around a hill.
Need rock-climbing friends? Hop on the Boulder Bus (boulderbus.co.uk) in London and by the time you reach the climbing areas of Fontainebleau ("Font" to English speakers, "Bleau" to the French), near Paris, you'll have your climbing partners sorted.
And it's amazing how close you get to perfect strangers when you're practising pulling them out of crevasses on a backcountry ski week in Chamonix, France, with Ski Freshtracks (skiclub.co.uk).
Susan Greenwood, adventure writer
Well-being holidays can be great for the solo traveller. You'll find plenty of others holidaying on their own in most spas and retreats. Days can be filled with pampering treatments or yoga sessions, and you're likely to meet people with similar interests. It's all about relaxation and getting away from hectic daily life, so if you want to spend time on your own, you won't be seen as a freak.
LeSport in St Lucia is a good, all-inclusive choice with a huge amount going on, which you can take or leave (thebodyholiday.com) and a decent chunk of guests are alone. For a restorative yoga retreat, try Simon Low's holidays at Huzur Vadisi in Turkey (huzurvadisi.com). The setting, up in the hills above Bodrum, is beautiful, there's four hours of yoga a day and a communal dining table where guests mix easily.
If money's tight, consider a stay in an ashram in India. Choose carefully, though. The Sivananda centre (sivananda.org) at Neyyar Dam, Kerala, is one of the more westernised – most guests are travellers staying for a few days. It's a fairly strict regime of meditation and yoga, and most accommodation is in dormitories, but you'll meet some great people – and it's only £6 a night all-inclusive.
Jane Dunford, writer
How to go to bars alone
Even for the most experienced solo travellers, there is often one area that remains out of bounds: the bar. Who wants to be the loser hugging their beer glass in the corner? But there are things you can do. Don't turn up at 10pm on a Saturday night. Mid-afternoon, you're more likely to look like an enigmatic stranger caught between appointments.
Avoid trendy cocktail bars where people keep to themselves. Instead opt for the down-to-earth places where you can pull up a stool at the bar and at least make conversation with the bartender. In Spain and South America, salsa bars are a good bet.
Don't hide behind a laptop. A notebook will make you look much more approachable.
If you start in a hidden corner, you will stay in a hidden dark corner.
Go easy on the alcohol. No one wants to talk to the strange drunkard. As a solo female traveller, you definitely don't want to be this person.
Have a good opening gambit. Something like: "I've heard [insert overhyped guidebook favourite] serves the best food in town – is it true?" Show them your guidebook – few people ever look at one for their own city and it often creates interest, as well as tips to store up for later.
Vicky Baker, travel writer and blogger at goinglocaltravel.com
How to go to restaurants alone
Go for busy restaurants; it means the food should be good, and single diners are likely to be put together at busy times. On a beach holiday, try to frequent the same bar/cafe. You get known. Sushi restaurants work well, as do any Spanish-style tapas. And always lower end – people seem more friendly. Eating at the bar always works a treat.
I take a notebook, usually to write down my thoughts, but making notes while looking at the menu seems to get you better service. Take a book that concerns the town or place – it often sparks up conversation with locals and/or travellers. Phrase books are good, too – practise on the waiting staff.
If you can't fathom the menu, do walk up to other diners and ask what they are eating. This can backfire – andouillettes topped with strong cheese looks great, but intestines taste like intestines, no matter how much gratin. Though going for the weird local dishes makes for conversation.
One more food-related tip: on a journey, bring biscuits to offer around. Germans train passengers seem particularly partial to M&S biscuits.
Tim Bryan, Guardian journalist
Connect with locals
The web has always been a superb companion for solo travellers, and when it comes to travel, social networks are actually social (but do be careful how much personal information you make known).
Sites such as couchsurfing.com, airbnb.com and iStopover.com are already connecting thousands of solo travellers with spare rooms across the world, with the added perk of a friendly host thrown in.
If you just want to head out and explore, play with foursquare.com, where hundreds of bars and clubs are matched to your exact location when you log in, with tips left by local users, and listing "trending" venues.
Sites such as leaplocal.org and localyte.com can help you track down a local guide to show you around. Or there may already be a friendly face in the city you are visiting – Dopplr.com will match your travel plans with friends. Twitter is always worth checking out – go to the search section, type in the city you are visiting and browse the findings for up-to-the-minute tips. But the king of travel sites is the oldest and best: Google Maps. With the app on your phone, or accessed via the mobile website, you will never be lost again.
Benji Lanyado, Guardian budget traveller