Every week I get tons of emails from travel companies trying to promote themselves. I delete almost all of them without looking beyond the subject line of the email. This week, however, I was grabbed by an email that was interesting to say it least. It was for the launch of a new internet dating site called Miss Travel that aimed to bring together men and women interested in travel.
Well, that isn’t quite what the site was about. What it claimed to do was let men (which they call generous travelers) pay for women (called attractive travelers) to accompany them on trips.
The idea of an internet dating site where people who love traveling can meet is actually not a bad idea (note to whoever creates this: I want stock options). However, this is not that thing.
For the record, there is no way in hell I am going to try and meet women on a site where the very premise of your meeting is that I have to pay money to some chick just to hang out with me. Every since I sold my internet consulting firm back in 1999 I’ve avoided women like this. They sort of sicken me. I am also not that desperate.
I am, however, not above signing up for the service to write a blog post about.
…which is exactly what I did :)
I signed up for the service and created a profile using my Twitter handle as my username. Given my travel resume, I figured I should do quite well. You can view the profile here. The profile mostly consists of text from my about page and images I’ve had taken of myself from the past 5-years. I mentioned nothing about money and also went out of my way to discourage the idea of 5-star, luxury travel.
Other than viewing other profiles, I did absolutely nothing. The site lets you set other profiles as a “favorite”, wink at someone, suggest a trip, and send someone a comment. I did none of these.
After five days, here are the results:
- 2 woman attempted to send me a message.
- 2 women suggest trips for me to take them on. One woman from the Ukraine wanted to go to Rio and another wanted to go to Orlando. Neither had made any other contact with me prior to asking me to pay for them to take a trip.
- 6 women favorited my profile. They come from Montana, Pennsylvania, Utah, Ukraine, London and Manchester.
- 16 women “winked at me”, which means according to the system that they want to date me.
- 72 women viewed my profile.
- Women who interacted with me ranged from 18 to 61.
- To contact anyone personally, you have to pay a minimum of $50 which has to be paid by the man. Fuck that.
A couple things to note:
- During the act of writing this post, I had to update the numbers on this several times. The site is clearly growing.
- The site just launched and a whole lot of women have signed up in the last few days. It has gotten press on CNN and other major news sites. I’m guessing in a few weeks the numbers will be radically different.
- One thing I haven’t seen written anywhere is that the site was created by the owners of whatsyourprice.com, a site where men have to literally bid to go out on dates with women. (File that under “you are fucking kidding me”)
- The percentage of women who bothered to engage with me in some way seems quite high given the number of women who looked at my profile. The photo I used was me on Easter Island. I figured that would filter out the women looking for photos of yachts and sports cars.
- There are a fair share of women in bikinis, which you’d expect. Most of the women in the system seem like very normal women. There seemed to be an above average number of cosmetologists on the site and a very low number of cosmologists….if you get my drift.
- There were a few woman who would probably be very interesting people to meet outside of this site. One was a professional cellist, which to be honest, is kind of hot.
- I didn’t get to check out any male profiles. However, given the running commentary I’ve watched on Twitter, they are probably even more ridiculous as they are trying to show off and impress.
The big question I keep asking myself during all of this is: WHERE THE HELL HAVE ALL THESE WOMEN BEEN THE LAST FIVE YEARS???
If being well traveled is such a major turn-on, I should have the world’s most active social life. I ought to have a woman in every port so to speak. I should be the nomadic Hugh Hefner.
I’m not.
When you get right down to it, the travel aspect of this site is just a ruse. It is all about money.
Believe me when I say, I’d like nothing more than to meet a smart woman who loves to travel. This site isn’t going to be the way it happens.
Ladies, you want a well traveled self made Eagle Scout with 3 degrees, I’m your guy. If you want a sugar daddy, please move along.
I leave you with the song that is probably going through all your heads: Gold Digger by Kanye West: