Solo travel and remote work have become closely linked in the last decade, and a body of research on the people actually living that way, rather than the version of it shown on social media, points to a specific, recurring problem: loneliness that does not resolve itself simply because the setting keeps changing.
What “digital nomad” research actually finds
In a 2023 study presented at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, the researchers Cristina Miguel, Christoph Lutz, Filip Majetić, Rodrigo Perez-Vega, and Maria Sanchez Razo conducted 15 in-depth interviews with people working remotely while travelling. Loneliness and a specific pattern the researchers call fear of missing out turned up as common, recurring themes rather than isolated complaints. Participants described social media as functioning in two opposing directions at once: it was one of the main tools people used to cope with loneliness on the road, and at the same time, watching other nomads’ curated posts fed a sense of missing out on a better version of the same lifestyle.
A follow-up study by an overlapping group of researchers, published in Media, Culture & Society in 2025 and based on 30 in-depth interviews, found a more mixed picture than a simple story of remote workers being lonely on the road. Digital nomadism variously produced loneliness, protected against it, or had no clear relationship to it at all, depending on factors like how long someone had been travelling, how intentionally they built local social ties, and whether they were travelling with any existing community or entirely alone.
Both studies rely on small, qualitative interview samples rather than large surveys, and neither claims to establish how common loneliness is among the wider population of remote workers who travel. What they do establish is that the isolation solo travel can produce is not an occasional glitch in an otherwise frictionless lifestyle. It is a recurring theme researchers keep finding when they actually sit down and ask people about it in detail, alongside a documented tension in how social media is used both to manage that isolation and to intensify it.
A separate, more concrete risk: safety, and the gap between worry and reality
A different strand of research looks specifically at risk perception and safety among solo travellers, with most of the available work focused on women, who report and experience distinct patterns of risk compared with men. A 2021 paper in the journal Current Issues in Tourism, by Deniz Karagöz, Cem Işık, Tarik Dogru, and Lu Zhang, found that female solo travellers rated psychological and physical risks as considerably more threatening than financial or other practical risks, a pattern the authors contrast with male travellers, who tended to rate financial risk as the most significant concern.
This is a difference in how risk is weighted and anticipated, not necessarily a direct measure of how often serious harm actually occurs. The same body of research consistently finds that sexual harassment, unwanted attention from strangers, and safety on public transport are the concerns solo female travellers name most often and prepare for most carefully, whether through choosing accommodation by location, reading other travellers’ reviews closely, or relying on online communities for shared, current safety information before a trip.
The interview research on digital nomads also identifies what tends to actually counteract the isolation, beyond individual coping habits. Participants in both the 2023 and 2025 studies pointed to coworking spaces and organised nomad communities, structured environments that put remote workers in regular, repeated contact with the same group of people, as more effective than ad hoc socialising for building the kind of relationship that reduces loneliness over time. The researchers note this is a deliberate substitute for the workplace and neighbourhood structures that ordinarily provide this contact without anyone arranging it, rather than evidence that any particular app, event, or single encounter reliably fixes the underlying problem.
Why the loneliness and safety findings point to the same underlying issue
Read together, these two bodies of research describe a mechanism rather than a mood. Solo travel removes a specific kind of built-in social infrastructure that a shared trip, a workplace, or a settled home life ordinarily provides without anyone having to arrange it deliberately: people who already know your patterns, notice if something is wrong, and share the practical and psychological load of navigating an unfamiliar place. The research on digital nomads suggests this absence produces loneliness often enough to be a recurring, documented theme, not an occasional bad week. The research on travel risk suggests the same absence changes how a person has to manage physical and social risk, since there is no travelling companion to share vigilance, split the cost of a safer option, or simply be present as a deterrent.
Neither finding argues against solo travel as a choice, and neither study measured it as worse, on balance, than travelling with others across every outcome that might matter to someone considering it. What the research supports is narrower: solo travel appears to remove a layer of default social protection, both emotional and physical, that has to be deliberately rebuilt through effort, whether that is maintaining outside relationships, building local community quickly, or actively managing personal safety, rather than being something the format of the trip provides on its own.
What this does not settle
The digital nomad interview studies are small and qualitative, useful for identifying a real pattern rather than measuring how widespread it is. The travel risk research draws primarily on self-reported perception rather than incident data comprehensive enough to state a precise likelihood of harm for any specific traveller in any specific place. Neither literature offers a verdict on whether solo travel is worth its documented costs for any individual reader, which depends on factors this research was not designed to weigh. What both bodies of work do support is a more grounded picture than either the promotional version of solo travel or a simple warning against it: the format brings real, well-documented costs in social connection and personal safety management that do not appear automatically, and are not automatically solved either, once someone is already on the road.
