The best U.S. cities for solo travelers in 2026

From Portland's food cart parks to Nashville's honky-tonks where strangers connect over live music, the best U.S. cities for solo travelers

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Solo travel works best when the destination does some of the work for you. A city with unreliable transportation or an unwalkable layout forces a solo traveler to spend attention on logistics that a better-designed destination handles invisibly. A destination with no natural gathering points makes meeting people difficult, even for the most sociable traveler. The best places for solo travel share a cluster of practical virtues: walkability or strong public transit, a range of solo-friendly activities, places where arriving alone draws no attention, and a community character that makes the traveler feel welcomed, not watched. Safety matters too, and the destinations on this list score well across all of these dimensions.

The U.S. solo travel landscape covers a wide range of preferences. Some solo travelers want maximum solitude: wilderness access, wellness retreats, the peace of a spa, or a long hike with no one waiting for you at the end. Others want the opposite: dense social scenes, live music venues, food halls, the easy connection that a vibrant urban neighborhood makes possible between strangers. The destinations here span that range, and several of them satisfy both modes in a single trip, with outdoor mornings and sociable evenings available within the same geography.

These 10 destinations come from Travel Leisure’s list of best places in the U.S. for solo travelers, representing the first 10 from the full list of 29 destinations that spans beach towns, mountain cities, music capitals, historic ports, and wellness destinations across 19 U.S. states, selected for safety, walkability, transit access, activity range, and the ease with which solo travelers can meet others or enjoy extended time alone in rewarding environments that the country’s best solo travel cities consistently and reliably provide to the solo traveler.

1. Naples builds solo days from the Gulf Beach to the dolphin cruise

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Naples, Florida, is a relatively small community on the southwest Gulf Coast with enough variety to keep a solo traveler occupied across several days without repeating an experience. The beach at the Naples Pier is the natural starting point: a wide, calm gulf beach, with the pier itself extending into the water and serving as a social gathering point independent of the sand. Kayaking in the mangroves adds a naturalist dimension to the trip and can be done at an individual pace without a group dynamic to manage.

Over 90 golf courses in the area make Naples one of the more accessible golf destinations in the country for a solo traveler who wants to pick up a round without pre-organizing a foursome. For a specific memorable experience, the source recommends a dolphin-watching cruise departing from Marco Island, about 30 minutes south of Naples. The cruise format is inherently social, placing a solo traveler in a small group context around a shared activity, and the dolphin sightings in the Gulf of Mexico around Marco Island rank among the more reliable on Florida’s southwest coast.

Beach access, active water activities, golf, and organized excursions from a nearby departure point together offer Naples a range of solo travel options that most small Florida communities do not offer in such concentration. Mangrove kayaking, in particular, provides a quiet, solitary experience as a counterpoint to the more social pier and cruise formats, so a solo traveler can calibrate the day’s sociability level within the same destination. Naples also benefits from being a relatively small community, which means it avoids the anonymity that large Florida metro areas foster and tends toward an approachable atmosphere that solo travelers appreciate. The proximity to Marco Island and the Ten Thousand Islands conservation area also gives Naples access to genuinely wild coastal environments within easy driving range.

2. Boston walks its history and rides the T across the river

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Boston feels smaller than its population and status as a major American city would suggest, which works in the solo traveler’s favor. The walkable historic core means the Freedom Trail, the waterfront, and the neighborhoods immediately surrounding downtown are all accessible on foot without needing to rely on transportation between stops. The T, Boston’s subway system, extends that range across the Charles River to Cambridge, where the university neighborhoods and bookshops provide a separate half-day itinerary distinct from the historic center.

The city’s museum scene offers strong solo-friendly options. The Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum offers an interactive historical experience rather than a passive exhibit hall, which suits solo engagement more naturally than museums organized around shared commentary. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is built around one of the world’s most famous unsolved art heists — the 1990 theft of 13 works, including Vermeer and Rembrandt — and the experience of seeing the empty frames where the stolen works hung gives the visit a specific kind of unresolved mystery that the Gardner deliberately preserves.

Boston’s reputation for being approachable despite its city scale is consistent across visitor accounts, and its neighborhood diversity — from the historic North End to the literary cafés near Harvard Square $SQ — means a solo traveler can spend several days there without exhausting distinct experiences. Walkability is the enabling factor: a city where a solo traveler can wander without a plan and consistently arrive at an interesting destination removes the logistical friction that makes urban solo travel difficult in less........

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