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Travelling for work? Start with the friends you already have there

Someone on r/TravelHacks put the whole problem in one line in November 2024: "I travel for work a lot… some cities just are not fun solo… I'd like a friend for happy hour and dinner at least one night. Is there an app for that?" Twenty-one replies came back, and every app named in them was built around strangers, from Bumble BFF and Timeleft to Meetup, Fairytrail, Eatwith and the city's own subreddit.

On plenty of work trips there are two or three people in the destination who already know you, and you have forgotten they moved. Start there. The list takes ten minutes. Then you have to write a message someone can say no to without it costing either of you anything. Most people write one that nobody can answer.

Ten minutes with your own contacts list

Your own connections list filters by city. Open it, click Search by filters, and the panel narrows by connections, location, company, school, industry and keywords (LinkedIn Help). The same help page caps that view at "100 pages or 1000 results". Filter first. Scroll instead and you hit the ceiling somewhere in the middle of your own network, having learned nothing about who lives in Lisbon.

A normal people search takes locations too, which matters because your connections list only holds the people you actually connected with. Type the keyword, pick the People tab, click All filters in the upper-right corner, put the city in the Add a location field under Locations, and hit Show results (LinkedIn Help). Search an old employer plus the city. The three people from your 2021 team who moved to Zurich never showed up in your connections list because you never connected, and they will still answer an email from someone they shared a floor with.

Schools third. A school's LinkedIn Page carries an Alumni tab that gives "high-level insights about the alumni of a school, as well as access to more detailed professional profiles" (LinkedIn Help). You browse it. There is no location filter documented on that page, and the option to filter alumni by year is gone.

The last pass has no tool behind it. Five minutes with the destination in your head, going through everyone who has ever mentioned moving there, taking a posting, marrying someone from the place or working out of an office you have never visited. No filter produces those names. Nothing about them was ever typed into a field on a profile. Write them down where you will see them again when you book the hotel.

The people who are only there the same week as you

Filters find residents. The person you know who happens to be in the same city on the same three days sits in no directory anywhere, and Reddit has been asking for a way to see them since at least 2018. From r/AppIdeas in June 2018: "An app where I could post my travel plans for work and see if any of my friends or contacts will also be in the same area when I am… Just random found out from an Instagram post but would have been cool to know ahead of time."

A client-side version showed up on r/digitalnomad in February 2018, where someone wrote that "It'd be great to know when random clients are in the same place as me. Would make some dinners less lonely!" Someone on the same subreddit described the result in December 2024: "Got many moments where I found out a friend was nearby but left already."

The manual version is a message with the city and the dates in it, posted to whichever group chat holds the right people roughly a week out. It works. The cost is that you repeat it every trip for every group, and the person who would have been in Lisbon that Thursday sits in a thread you did not think to post in.

CitySync is the only app I found that names this persona. Free, iOS only, and its listing says it "enables travelers to receive alerts when colleagues or friends will be in the same city", with later updates adding trip sharing, group chat, tee-time and dining bookings and nearby events. Version 99 when I checked on 6 September 2026, dated 17 March. It publishes nothing, so the store listing is all anyone has to go on. The rest of that category, about twelve apps, is in apps that tell you when friends are in the same city.

Asking so that a no costs nothing

Someone on r/androidapps named the blocker in September 2021: "asking if they're there manually and getting 'no' as an answer most of the time feels kind of awkward". Four nos in a row and you stop asking, which is how a list of eight names becomes an empty week.

A message that survives that carries the dates, your part of town, one named evening, and a way out.

"In Munich Tue to Thu for work, staying near the Hauptbahnhof. I have Wednesday free from seven. Dinner? Totally fine if the week is bad."

Dates let someone check a calendar instead of committing to a feeling. Your neighbourhood answers the question they are actually weighing, which is how far across town they would have to come on a Wednesday after work. One evening with a time on it can be answered in ten seconds, and "we should meet up while I'm there" cannot be answered at all. Most people drop the last line. Keep it. It lets someone say no by describing their week.

Send it to a group wherever you can. Six people in a thread means nobody has been singled out, whoever is free replies first, and the four who are busy never have to compose a refusal.

The evening when nobody is free

That evening will happen. The default is the hotel bar, and people land there because working out what is on within walking distance is harder than it should be. A work traveller asked r/apps about this in June 2025, in a thread titled "Any good event apps for discovering local happenings while traveling for work?": "I've tried apps like Luma, Eventbrite… but I often find that the listings are too focused on larger, organized events. I'm looking for local happenings and meetups." Eleven upvotes, twenty-five comments, and the only app named in the thread was AllEvents.

The city's own tourist board calendar is the densest free listing I have found for a city, and after that the sites of the venues within a kilometre or two of the hotel. Concert halls, opera houses and municipal museums publish months ahead, so the Wednesday of a city you land in tomorrow is already fully described somewhere. It just is not aggregated. I wrote out the manual method, country by country, in how to find out what's on in a city you're visiting.

The stranger apps, and what they cost in September 2026

Prices below come from the US App Store and the products' own sites, all opened on 6 September 2026.

If I had one free evening in a city where I knew nobody, I would book Timeleft. A table for five. A venue already chosen, no planning to do, and check those purchase tiers before you fly. For a city you visit every six weeks, Meetup is the better answer, because the same group meets again and by the third visit you are not the new person.

What Will U Be There does here, and what it does not

I built it for the second problem on this page, the people who will be in that city the same week as you with no way for either side to find out. You add a trip as a city and two dates. Your friends add theirs. When two trips land within 100 km of each other on overlapping dates, both of you get a push notification, and if you miss each other by up to about a week it flags the near miss, so you can move a day while the flight is still changeable.

For the empty evening it shows concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside your dates, pulled from more than 360 hand-picked sources across 57 countries. Over 200,000 events are in there right now, many of them flagged free. Coverage is uneven. A European capital is dense, a mid-sized industrial town might return nothing at all.

It never receives your location, because there is no GPS in the app at all. A trip is a city and two dates you typed in. The account around it holds an email, a display name, a username, your home city, your friend list and a push token, and not one of those fields moves when you do, so there is nothing there that could show a friend where you are standing. A matched friend sees the one overlapping city and those dates, never the rest of your trip list, and the long version of all of that is at privacy first.

Your colleagues do not have to sign up one by one either. Make a group for the conference or the client account. One link, up to 200 people, no friend requests inside it. And it does something on your first trip before anyone joins, because the events for your city and dates are there immediately. It runs on iPhone and Android, free, no in-app purchases, no ads, in 17 languages. App Store, Google Play, and the site is willubethere.app.

What it will not do: introduce you to strangers, plan the trip, book anything, or tell you where a friend is right now. If your problem is a city where you know nobody at all, this app has nothing for you. Book Timeleft. For the other case, where you keep finding out afterwards, the mechanism is in how to know when a friend will be in the same city as you.

Before the next trip, do the ten-minute version. Filter your connections by that city, pick two names, and send the Wednesday message with the real date in it. Worst case both say no, and you spend the evening at whatever the opera house four streets from the hotel has on.