Thomas Kovacs
Webmaster and Creative Artist
Welcome to the first in a series of articles where personly explores how modernised personals can offer a compelling alternative to the profile and photo based matching apps that are currently dominating the dating and meet-up landscape. In this article we will be focusing on the travel aspect of matching up and how personals are more flexible and effective in establishing meaningful connections with others while travelling.
When one arrives as a solo traveller to a new city, a basic inclination is to get out and explore. And while solo exploration has a certain charm in its own right, doing it together with a local or another fellow traveller adds a certain texture and quality to the experience that cannot otherwise be easily obtained. After all, what better way to learn about a city than through first hand knowledge and experience?
But how to meet that someone when arriving in a new city? Well as it turns out modern matching apps are quite useless for this purpose. For one, having to alter your profile description to state that you are new in town has a somewhat negative appeal: the description is designed for one to describe oneself, not to describe a specific activity to do or goal to achieve, especially within a limited timeframe. What happens when the people that have already been matched in the hometown see the altered profile? Furthermore, by the time a match has been made, the traveller could already have left town since the match can happen at a much later date.
What travellers need is a simple way to publish their intentions via a personal, view a list of replies and select the one that fits their current situation the best. Previous personal based websites such as Craigslist Personals were great in this respect because one could immediately see the current open personals, or create a personal and wait for replies. However, newer personal sites such as personly aim to improve this process not only by the personal creator being able to pre-determine the number of replies via tokens, but also by improving the relevancy of matches returned and thus avoid having to scroll through numerous personals to find the ones that best fit. Lastly, once a traveller has left the city, the personal can easily be cancelled just as easily as it was created, leaving your other set of matched personals completely unchanged.
In conclusion, travellers do not need to feel constrained anymore when trying to match people online with similar interests. Anonymous tokenised personals are very well designed to fit the criteria of travellers who are eager to explore new cities and would like to get to know people there. Try personly when the mood for Wanderlust strikes you and we hope to see you online soon!