tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.
Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with “interchangeable” business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.
And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre … nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.
So it’s no surprise that this happens:
You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go.
I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation for its drinks (I am partial to local beers in such circumstances). Often they look like “old man pubs” but as I advance into old-man-ness myself, I find these more and more welcoming.
Then don’t go hide in a corner but instead, hang out at the bar and get into a drinks-related conversation. Can be as simple as asking for a drink recommendation from the server, or once you’ve sunk one or two, other recommendations for drinking around town. You may find yourself stuck in a “beer bore” conversation but more often in my experience this is just the starting point. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but retreating to a corner table, reading a book or resorting to a smartphone are all signs of giving up, and most places I’ve travelled these are clear signals that a person doesn’t want to be disturbed.
More generally, it’s all about revealing some kind of common ground—and showing other people that you have potential conversation value (some kind of conversation-starter signals), AND are interested in talking to them. Not all one-off visitors want a chat—and going back to the original point, this is very often the case with business travellers who might just be counting the days until they return home, or focussed so much on work they don’t care about their surroundings.
Finally, there are of course vastly different social practices across different countries, regions, neighbourhoods. My comments above are mainly related to my experiences in England and northern Europe. My experience in Scotland, and Ireland (and even more so, midwestern USA, where I grew up) is that one must work hard if one wishes to avoid conversation with locals.
tl;dr: go to places with conversation potential and show that you have value and interest.
Business travel + city destination is a significant obstacle already. Locals may well be highly jaded with “interchangeable” business travellers who are fatigued on the road and may not be at their best socially.
And usually business travellers stay in places that are convenient for their work destinations, be it office, site or conference centre … nearby establishments are far more likely to attract after-work crowds (catching up socially with friends, or continuing workplace conversations), not very good opportunity for an outsider to get involved.
So it’s no surprise that this happens:
I see loads of people like this in the nearest pubs and hotel bars to my workplace: dozens of solo travelers who are not engaged/engaging with the locals in the slightest. There are various ways to improve on this but it requires social effort. First, choice of destination is key. I travel a lot for work, and always try to find a pub or bar away from the main business areas, ideally with a good reputation for its drinks (I am partial to local beers in such circumstances). Often they look like “old man pubs” but as I advance into old-man-ness myself, I find these more and more welcoming.
Then don’t go hide in a corner but instead, hang out at the bar and get into a drinks-related conversation. Can be as simple as asking for a drink recommendation from the server, or once you’ve sunk one or two, other recommendations for drinking around town. You may find yourself stuck in a “beer bore” conversation but more often in my experience this is just the starting point. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but retreating to a corner table, reading a book or resorting to a smartphone are all signs of giving up, and most places I’ve travelled these are clear signals that a person doesn’t want to be disturbed.
More generally, it’s all about revealing some kind of common ground—and showing other people that you have potential conversation value (some kind of conversation-starter signals), AND are interested in talking to them. Not all one-off visitors want a chat—and going back to the original point, this is very often the case with business travellers who might just be counting the days until they return home, or focussed so much on work they don’t care about their surroundings.
Finally, there are of course vastly different social practices across different countries, regions, neighbourhoods. My comments above are mainly related to my experiences in England and northern Europe. My experience in Scotland, and Ireland (and even more so, midwestern USA, where I grew up) is that one must work hard if one wishes to avoid conversation with locals.