Friendships Formed Through Travel with Leah Arao – Episode 7

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Summary

In this episode of Bon Voyage Besties, hosts Rachel and Rosa are joined by travel agent and content creator Leah Arao to explore the intersection of travel and friendship. They discuss unique travel styles like ‘bougie backpacking’ and the joys of slow travel, along with the challenges of making and maintaining friendships while on the road. Leah shares her experiences balancing remote work and travel, and the emotional connections formed through shared journeys. The episode covers topics like reconnecting with friends in new places, backpacking in South America, and building meaningful connections while traveling. Tune in for practical tips on forging lasting friendships!

Key Takeaways

Embrace Flexibility in Travel: Leah emphasizes the importance of being open to spontaneous travel plans and adapting to new opportunities, such as joining friends on unexpected trips.

Building Friendships on the Road: Shared experiences, like staying in hostels or participating in group activities, can lead to lasting friendships. Leah shares stories of meeting people during her travels and maintaining those connections over time.

The Art of Slow Travel: Leah discusses her approach to slow travel, which involves spending extended periods in one location to fully immerse in the culture and lifestyle.

Navigating Communication Styles: Maintaining long-distance friendships requires understanding and adapting to different communication preferences, whether through social media, messaging, or in-person meetups.

Traveling with a Bougie Backpacker Style: Leah describes her travel style as a mix of budget-friendly and luxury experiences, highlighting the balance between staying in hostels and enjoying fine dining.

Making Friends Beyond Hostels: Leah suggests engaging in activities like food tours, wine tastings, and local events as great ways to meet new people while traveling.

Letting Go of Expectations: Leah advises travelers to drop expectations of finding lifelong friends or romantic partners on every trip and instead focus on enjoying the moment and the people they meet.

Call to Action: Explore new destinations with an open heart and mind, and don’t be afraid to connect with fellow travelers along the way.

Listen on APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

The Magic of Friendships Formed Through Travel

There’s a particular kind of friendship that only travel can create. You meet a stranger in a hostel, on a boat, or at the top of a mountain, and within hours, sometimes literal minutes, you’ve bonded over something so immediate and shared that the connection feels almost inexplicably real.

On this week’s Bon Voyage Besties, we sat down with Leah Arao, aka LA In Flight, travel agent, content creator, and co-host of the award-winning Ticket 2 Anywhere podcast, to talk about friendships formed through travel — how they happen, how to keep them, and why they’re worth every effort.

Why travel friendships hit differently

Leah has spent years slow traveling across South America, Southeast Asia, Central America, Australia, and beyond, and she’s unusually thoughtful about why the friendships made on the road feel so distinct from the ones made at home.

Her answer is simple: shared experience and shared timing.

After all, when you meet someone in a new place, you’re both arriving with the same open energy. You’re excited, curious, and looking for the same things. You’re not being assigned to each other by circumstance, like coworkers or classmates. You choose each other, spontaneously, based on vibes alone.

Leah’s best example is Kate, a woman she met while both were working as volunteer bartenders at a party hostel in Cusco, Peru. The bar manager scheduled them on the same outdoor shift on Halloween, which was unsurprisingly, the hostel’s biggest night of the year, and told them to go sell as much beer as possible. They danced on the bar, attracted a crowd, and broke sales records for the company. Nine years later, Leah and Kate are still close friends, even though Leah lives in Los Angeles and Kate lives in London. They see each other every other year, and the friendship has never wavered.

The reunion you never saw coming

Some of the best stories about friendships formed through travel involve reconnections that nobody planned.

For example, Leah met a Dutch man at the top of Machu Picchu after both she and Kate had been separated from their tour group. The three of them spent three hours exploring the ruins together, exchanged Facebook contacts at the last second, and then went their separate ways. Eight years passed.

YET. Leah found herself with a free window while traveling in the Netherlands and messaged him on a whim. He rearranged his schedule and hosted her for four days. Just like that, eight years of social media watching each other’s lives from a distance turned into a genuine reunion.

Rachel had a strikingly similar experience. A guy she’d briefly crossed paths with while backpacking the Baltics years ago saw her post that she was heading to Tokyo and reached out. They ended up meeting twice during her trip, once for five or six hours of catching up and once more on her second-to-last night, and had an amazing time. “I legit never thought I would see you again,” she told him. “And here we are in Tokyo.”

How to actually make friends on the road

The most consistent advice Leah gives (and lives by) is to put yourself in spaces that already reflect your interests. You will find your people naturally.

She met a couple on a wine tour in Australia who became instant day-friends. She met a stranger at a casino sports bar in Las Vegas watching the Super Bowl who became a recurring annual connection. She met eleven Dutch strangers on a four-day boat trip through Palawan in the Philippines, hung out with them for four more days afterward, and later couch-surfed her way through their houses in Amsterdam.

None of those friendships started with a strategy. They started with proximity, curiosity, and a willingness to talk to people. Leah’s practical advice for anyone who finds that intimidating: start at home.

Take a cooking class in your own city. Show up to a Meetup event. Ask a well-connected friend to introduce you to someone in an industry you find interesting. Get comfortable talking to strangers in low-stakes environments, and then take that ease with you when you travel.

Food tours and wine experiences are particularly fertile ground for connection, Rachel even swears by them. She’s made friends on food tours in Japan, been adopted for a day by French couples in Portugal, and had three-hour conversations with school bus drivers at hotel bars in California. Something about sharing a meal lowers everyone’s guard in the best possible way.

The hard part: keeping it going

Not every friendship formed through travel survives the separation, and Leah is honest about that. She describes carrying the weight of a friendship after leaving Australia. Always reaching out first, often left on read, and having to consciously decide not to take it personally. Different communication styles, different time zones, different seasons of life. When that friend finally had a layover in LA, they spent twelve straight hours together like no time had passed. The friendship was still there. It had just gone quiet.

The ones that last, she says, tend to be the ones where both people put in the effort, even inconsistently. Group chats help. Social media helps. Leah is still active in a group chat with her core friend group from Australia, all from different countries, with a flag emoji for each as their group icon.

Rosa does a regular check-in with her best friend in Portugal, even when busy schedules make it hard. Rachel sends memes to her friend in Liverpool almost daily. None of these are grand gestures. They’re small, consistent acts of not letting go.

Drop the expectations, keep the curiosity

Leah’s parting advice is the most freeing thing you can hear before you travel: let go of the expectation that every connection needs to become a lifelong friendship. Some will. Most will be wonderful for the three days you share them, and that’s enough. Approach people with curiosity instead of agenda — ask about their lives, their countries, their opinions. Be genuinely interested. And if someone’s not feeling it, read the room, let it go, and try again tomorrow.

Nobody is thinking about you as much as you think they are. Nobody remembers the awkward moment as long as you do. The trip is yours.

Go enjoy it, talk to people, and let the friendships find you.

Listen on APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE

Follow Leah at @LAInFlight on Instagram, TikTok, and all social platforms. Listen to the Ticket 2 Anywhere podcast every other Wednesday wherever you stream podcasts. Find Bon Voyage Besties on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeart, and follow us at @BonVoyageBesties.