Key Takeaways
- A recent Priceline report found that some Gen Z singles see traveling as a pseudo-dating app that helps them make more meaningful connections.
- Gen Z invests time and money in traveling for love, suggesting they’d also like app features that make love-seeking easier and more rewarding.
- Gen Z singles want a vacation romance, and they identified hotel bars, cruises, and music festivals as strategic places to foster love connections.
Gen Z is 2.8 times more likely than the average jet-setter to believe traveling is “the new dating app,” according to Priceline’s recent Travel Trend report. It’s a phenomenon that Priceline calls “Flocking” — which is when Gen Z singles swap phones for plane tickets with the intention of meeting new people on vacation.
“As young travelers seek companionship, they’ll increasingly turn to communal spaces and activities that make it easy and fun to interact with people they’ve never met before,” according to the report.
For dating professionals, this is not exactly a revelation. Gen Z has long craved meaningful, in-person connections over virtual ones. The bigger surprise is that they’re willing to hop on a plane to make those connections happen.
With singles more open than ever to traveling for love, the dating industry has an opportunity to meet these daters where they are — wherever they are in the world — with IRL dating events, travel and hospitality partnerships, and of course, travel-based discovery tools on dating apps.
Travel is a Potentially-Lucrative Avenue for Apps
Dating industry professionals, take note: If travel is really “a new dating app,” then it’s one people are willing to spend a lot of time and money on.
It wouldn’t be the first time. In an unfamiliar setting, travelers may rely on their tried and (somewhat) true dating apps to make a steamy new connection, and the apps know it; it’s why Grindr’s “Roam,” Tinder’s Passport mode, and Bumble’s premium Travel mode exist in the first place.
But as young singles continue to lose faith in dating apps, it’s never been more important for the apps to dig deeper than location-based matchmaking tools. After all, daters would rather spend money on one or two meaningful connections than 10 superficial ones.
We know this because 78% of respondents told Forbes that they sometimes, often, or always feel emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by dating apps, so the fewer so-so connections, the better.
The burnout is real: Twenty-four percent of respondents said they are tired of having repetitive conversations on the apps, 22% are sick of swiping, and 21% are over spending precious time making flimsy connections. Forty percent are simply burnt out because dating apps have not successfully matched them with someone compatible.
This burnout is also connected to the nearly one hour of swiping and messaging the average dating app user does in a day, according to Forbes.
Clearly, daters need a vacation from dating apps. It isn’t hard to believe that some singles would rather spend that wasted hour exploring a new city and its fascinating inhabitants. They want serendipitous meet-cutes instead of swipes, and meaningful conversations instead of surface-level texts, or worse, being ghosted.
Gen Z singles in particular are willing to sink their time and money into vacation activities that bring them closer to the area’s culture and people: tours, adventurous excursions, local cooking classes, history walks, club hopping, bar crawls, and anything else that encourages socialization.
Gen Z is Twice as Likely to Want a Vacation Romance
Gen Z is getting serious about this whole “travel is the new dating app” thing, according to Priceline: “Gen Z is 74% more likely than the average traveler to have researched the best travel destinations to meet new people.”
Apart from social vacation activities, singles want to travel places where they can bond with others over a particular shared interest. Priceline highlights the romantic potential of hotel bars, cruise ships, and music festivals. Each of these settings has a focalized group of people with similar interests, most of whom are ready and willing to socialize.
Modern singles crave apps, platforms, and dating professionals who make it easier for travelers to access these types of places.
Singles don’t necessarily want to “get away from it all” on vacation, but to make lasting, important connections. These passionate socializers are twice as likely to be interested in a vacation romance, according to Priceline.
If dating apps can meet Gen Z where they’re most open to connection, then they just might be able to rejuvenate these users’ interest in dating apps.
Gone are the days when singles expected dating apps to simply offer up a few random matches. Nowadays, they want their dating apps to suggest fun, in-person ways to meet new people, all the better if the activities lean into this generation’s passion for travel.
