A new dating website has launched which aims to pair rich men who don’t like to travel alone, with attractive women who want a free holiday.
In what vaguely resembles an escort agency, although the site claims otherwise, MissTravel.com guarantees a mutually beneficial arrangement as “the only online dating website for travellers”.
Similar to sugar daddy dating websites with a globetrotting theme, the “generous” travelling member is expected to pay all travel expenses for “attractive” travelling members.
“Attractive travellers” can either accept a “generous traveller’s” proposal to visit his or her home town, or go on a trip together.
MissTravel.com also offers “benefits” as a way to entice women to the site, providing a points-based incentive system. The site explains: “Generous members have the ability to gift frequent flyer points to Attractive members.”
It continues: “Attractive members who accumulate enough frequent flyer points may redeem them for free airline tickets and hotel rooms, allowing them the opportunity to travel the world for free.”
A writer at Jezebel site signed up as an Attractive Female to see what the site was really like, and concluded that “it’s like a regular dating site.”
She wrote: “There are chiselled orange heirs on yachts who are probably liars, bewigged white executives looking for ‘black or mixed females only’, faux-poetic blowhards spouting bullshit they think makes them sound sensitive, sad and lonely people who are painful to look at, and a (lot of) of gross married dudes.”
The Jezebel writer points out that while lonely people have the right to buy company if they so choose, and women are equally allowed to make their own “possibly bad” choices, this particular site has the ability to facilitate a large amount of coercion.
One could argue that it is mutually-beneficial, reasoning that the women are using and objectifying the men as much as the men are using and objectifying the women.
However there is an obvious power imbalance, swaying in favour of the “generous traveller”.
The site also disclaims it does not do its own background checks on its members, which is a potentially scary position to be in for a girl who finds herself thousands of kilometres away from home with a stranger, only to realise she doesn’t want to “put out”. – Daily Mail