The trade secrets nobody puts in the guidebooks — and the quiet philosophy underneath them.
I want to tell you about a small conversation I had a few years ago in a café in Lisbon.
I was solo travelling — three weeks, no fixed itinerary, one carry-on. I’d wandered into a place with pastel walls and old jazz playing, and I ended up chatting with a woman at the counter next to me. She was maybe fifty. Australian. Solo. Clearly seasoned.
We got to comparing notes on the road, as solo travellers do, and after a bit she said, almost offhandedly: “You always leave a pair of muddy men’s boots outside your door, right? At Airbnbs. In cheaper hotels.”
I stared at her. I did not, in fact, do this.
She looked mildly disappointed in me. Then she explained: pick them up from a thrift store on your first day in a new city. Size eleven, ideally. Muddy is better than clean. Leave them outside the door of wherever you’re staying. Anyone walking down the corridor — including anyone who might be scoping for a solo woman travelling alone — sees “someone big lives here.” You sleep undisturbed. Total cost: eight euros. Peace of mind: enormous.
Then she added, still casual: “Some of us have been doing this for twenty years. It’s not paranoia. It’s just travel with the naïveté taken out.”
That sentence stayed with me. Because she was right — the difference between a nervous solo traveller and a seasoned one isn’t caution vs. courage. It’s the accumulation of small, slightly ridiculous tricks that experienced solos have been quietly using for decades to make their lives easier, safer, and less watched.
I’ve been collecting them ever since. Here are the ones I trust most.
First, a Note on What This Essay Is Not
Before we dive in, let me say what this piece is not.
It’s not a fear-based essay. Solo travel is, statistically, safer than most people think. Millions of people do it every year without incident. If you’re waiting for permission to book that trip you’ve been eyeing, this isn’t the essay that tells you the world is dangerous. The world is, mostly, fine.
It’s also not a “how to be paranoid on the road” piece. Nothing in here requires you to be anxious. In fact, the opposite: the reason experienced solos use these tricks is precisely because they let you relax. When you’ve quietly outsourced a certain amount of situational awareness to a pair of muddy boots or a phantom cocktail, your brain stops running the low-grade background threat scan. You’re free to actually enjoy the trip.
This is not paranoia. This is offloading. The hacks in this essay are small, cheap, and clever ways to let your surroundings do the work of signalling “I am accompanied, tracked, watched, and not worth targeting” — so you don’t have to spend the trip performing it yourself.
Let’s go.
Hack #1: The Muddy Boots Outside the Door
This is the one that started it all for me, and it remains my favourite because it’s so absurd on paper and so effective in practice.
Buy a pair of large, worn-in, thrift-store boots on your first day in a new city. Men’s, ideally. Size 11 or above. Muddy is better than clean. Ugly is better than nice.
Leave them outside your accommodation door — Airbnb, guesthouse, cheaper hotel, wherever the corridor is visible to other guests. If you’re in a place that puts everyone’s shoes in the entryway, put them there.
Anyone walking past your door sees a very clear signal: someone large lives in this room. Even the most casual “who’s staying alone here” scan gets your room mentally filed under “couple” or “male,” and their attention moves on.
Total cost: whatever the local equivalent of ten dollars is. Total time investment: fifteen minutes on your first afternoon. Total transformation: you sleep like a person who lives with a very large partner.
Variant for hotels: if you can’t leave shoes in the corridor, throw a large men’s-sized jacket over the desk chair, visible through the peephole from outside. Room-service staff, housekeepers, and any curious eyes see a “second person” in the room and calibrate accordingly.
Hack #2: The Phantom Second Drink
You’re at a bar. You’re alone. You’re perfectly happy alone — that’s why you came. But somebody at the other end of the bar has been watching, and their trajectory looks like it ends at your seat.
Order a second drink.
Whatever you’re having. Set it across the table from you, in front of the empty chair. Drape a jacket, a scarf, or your book over the chair. Take a sip of your own drink. Check your phone occasionally. Look mildly annoyed at the door — the “seriously, where is she” face.
You now have an invisible, always-late companion. Nobody approaches a woman waiting for someone. The person watching you re-reads the scene, decides you’re taken, and looks elsewhere.
If nobody approaches — great, you have a spare drink for later. If the vibe passes, invite the person over, or don’t. Sovereignty is having options, not being forced into a specific interaction.
A subtler variant: just order the second drink and leave it untouched. You don’t even need the jacket. The mere presence of two drinks reads “accompanied.” Bartenders — who are your allies in all of this, always — will often quietly play along.
Hack #3: The Fake Wedding Ring
A three-hundred-rupee band from any street market. Silver-toned, plain, unremarkable. Slipped on before you leave your accommodation.
For traditionally female solo travellers especially, this deters the specific category of “available” attention that targets women perceived to be unattached. The ring signals: I am accounted for, elsewhere, and my movements are watched by someone who is waiting for me.
Take it off at dinner if you want to be approachable. Put it back on before you walk back to your accommodation. Take it off when you’re at the beach or a museum. Put it on at bus stations and airports.
This isn’t about lying about your relationship status — you owe nobody the truth of that. It’s about managing which social protocols apply to you in a given moment. A ring is a passport-of-social-status. You get to decide when to show it.
A variant for men who want the same effect: a well-worn, obviously used wedding band on the ring finger, plus a lock-screen photo of a woman (any woman — sister, friend, stock photo of a smiling woman with a dog) visible whenever the phone comes out. Signals “married, family man, not looking.” Deters the “targetable solo male” scan by pickpockets and scammers who profile lone men in tourist areas.
Hack #4: The Loud Phone Call to Nobody
You’re walking through an unfamiliar neighbourhood. Something feels slightly off — the street’s emptied out, the vibe’s shifted, you’re not sure if you’re being followed or just paranoid.
Pull out your phone. Hold it to your ear. Have a loud, cheerful, specific conversation.
“Yeah, I’m five minutes away. Yes, I remember the address. Tell him I said hi. What? No, I turned left at the plaza, I’m coming from that direction. Okay. Okay. See you in a minute. Love you, bye.”
Then keep walking, at a slightly increased pace, phone still in hand.
Opportunists — the category of low-stakes bad actors who prey on distracted, isolated solos in tourist areas — look for people who appear unobserved. Someone mid-conversation with a known contact reads as tracked by another person. If something happens, someone will know within minutes. The math changes. They move on.
This works even when the phone is dead or you have no signal. The performance is the whole thing. Nobody around you knows whether the call is real.
Bonus: get into the habit of doing this on any walk home after dark, whether or not you feel a threat. It’s free, it’s small, and it means you never have to do the internal calculation of “should I be doing this right now?” You just always do it.
Hack #5: The Two-Hotel First Night
Here’s one for the seriously paranoid — and by paranoid I mean seasoned.
When you arrive in a new city, especially one where you feel visible (as a foreign traveller, a solo woman, a high-net-worth-appearing person, whatever), book two accommodations for your first night.
You check into the first. You unpack. You get the taxi driver’s memory of dropping you at address A. Then, an hour later, you leave with your bag and walk (or take a fresh taxi) to accommodation B, where you actually sleep.
Cost: one extra night’s booking, often refundable if you cancel within the window.
Benefit: nobody in your booking chain — not the airport taxi driver, not the app that matched you to a room, not any hotel staff who might’ve been chatty about a solo traveller checking in — knows where you actually spent the night. From night two onwards, you’re on the “real” address, and the trail is clean.
This is overkill for most travel. But for certain solos — women travelling in higher-risk areas, digital nomads with visible tech gear, people who’ve had prior stalking issues, or just anyone whose intuition says “let me not be findable on the first night” — it’s a small, expensive-ish, remarkably effective form of camouflage.
Hack #6: The “Family” Group Chat Screenshot
Somewhere on your phone, keep a screenshot of a group chat titled “Family” or “Cousins” or “Weekend crew.” The actual contents don’t matter — pizza plans, weekend chaos, forwarded memes, whatever.
Have it ready to glance at when a taxi driver, a nosy hostel-mate, or a curious local asks the question every solo traveller has fielded a thousand times: “You’re travelling alone?”
Glance at your phone. Smile. Say: “My cousins are meeting me at the hotel tonight, actually. They’re always running late.” Or: “My brother’s flying in tomorrow — we’re doing the second half of the trip together.”
Nine times out of ten, the question is innocuous. But the one time it isn’t, you’ve quietly repositioned yourself in the questioner’s mind from “lone traveller” to “person with people arriving imminently.” And that repositioning changes what happens next.
You don’t owe anyone the truth of your solo status. You owe yourself safety. The screenshot is the tool.
Hack #7: The Decoy Wallet
This one’s for pickpocket-heavy tourist zones — Barcelona, Rome, Paris, parts of Southeast Asia, anywhere the guidebook says “be careful in crowded areas.”
Carry two wallets.
The real wallet — your actual cards, ID, cash — lives in a money belt under your clothes, or a hidden inner pocket, or your bra, or wherever your specific outfit allows.
The decoy wallet — a cheap wallet with expired store cards, small notes totalling maybe fifteen dollars, and one blocked bank card you’re keeping just for this purpose — lives in your visible back pocket or side pocket.
If you’re pickpocketed, they get the decoy. If you’re mugged and told to “hand over your wallet,” you hand over the decoy. You look mildly distraught (easy to summon), and the encounter ends with your actual money, cards, and ID safely on your person.
This is a small, cynical bit of theatre. It has saved solo travellers real losses. It costs about twenty dollars to set up. Do it before your next high-pickpocket-risk trip.
Hack #8: The Wrong-Name Taxi
When booking a taxi to your accommodation from the airport — especially in areas where the driver is going to see exactly where you’re staying — enter a slightly different destination.
Not wildly different. Just off. The hotel three blocks away. The Starbucks on your street. The metro station closest to your building.
Get out. Pay. Wait until the taxi has driven off. Then walk the remaining three blocks to your actual accommodation.
The driver, if they later share notes with anyone, doesn’t have your real address. You’ve walked the last leg carrying your own bag, which is a small hassle. But the knowledge trail now ends at the Starbucks, not your bedroom.
Overkill for most trips. Sanity-preserving for the trips where your gut says otherwise.
The Philosophy Underneath All of This
Read all eight hacks together and something interesting emerges.
None of them require fear. None of them require paranoia. None of them require you to walk around in a state of constant vigilance. In fact, they do the opposite: they outsource certain kinds of situational awareness to props, protocols, and small performances — which frees your mind to do what you actually came for, which is enjoy the trip.
The muddy boots do the “is anyone here alone” signalling for you. The phantom drink does the “is this woman approachable” signalling for you. The ring, the fake call, the group-chat screenshot — all of them let your surroundings do the work of protecting you, so your brain doesn’t have to.
Seasoned solo travellers know something the guidebooks don’t emphasize enough: safety on the road isn’t about strength or luck. It’s about signal management. The people who get targeted are the ones whose signals — visible, isolated, unaccompanied, unobserved, distracted — invite the wrong attention. Every hack in this essay is a small piece of counter-signalling. Together, they add up to a solo traveller who moves through the world broadcasting the same information as a group of five, while actually being one.
That’s not paranoia. That’s design. Just like the Crisis Tree at home, just like the eco-system in your neighbourhood — solo travel is a designed practice, and the design is what makes it feel light instead of scary.
The seasoned solo isn’t braver than you. She’s just been collecting tricks for longer.
A Small Reminder
Nothing in this essay replaces the basics.
Text your itinerary to at least one person. Share your live location during transit. Keep your accommodation address written down in the local language. Have a photo of your passport in cloud storage. Know the emergency number of the country you’re in (it’s 112 for most of Europe, 911 in the Americas, 100/108/112 in India). Buy travel insurance.
These are the seatbelt of solo travel. Wear them.
The hacks in this essay are the airbag — the extra layer that most people don’t bother with, but that seasoned solos install without discussion.
Layer both. And go book the trip.
