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Want to hail a ride to the Black Sea coast without leaving your office? New 'find a travel partner' web sites springing up all over the Russian Internet are making it possible.
With just a month of summer left, Natalya is desperate to get out of Moscow and spend some quality beach time, but she needs to find someone to travel with to avoid feeling like a third wheel.
"A girl and her boyfriend are coming with me, but I am alone," Natalya said in her posting on Mahnem.ru, which can be loosely translated as "Let's go." She hopes to find a man or woman to join her two-week vacation to the resort town of Sochi, she said, with whom she can hang out at the beach and see the sights.
People looking to share travel costs, catch a ride to an outdoor concert or meet someone fun to travel with have been flocking to the web site since it launched in April. The ranks of similar sites, some using travel as a pretext for online dating, are swelling on the RuNet.
Ruslan Sadekov, the 26-year-old founder of Mahnem.ru, thinks of his online creation as "virtual hitchhiking." About 400 different users log on to the site every day to catch or give a ride at the peak of the travel season, he said.
Another web site matching up travelers, Poputchika.net, was launched two years ago by Dmitry Deniskin. Poputchika.net, or "no travel companion," is now visited by 600 people per day, said Deniskin, also 26.
The site began growing on its own," said Deniskin, who like Sadekov originally created his web page as a hobby. Users, who register on these sites but pay nothing to use them, continue pouring in.
About 15.6 million Russians took off to see the country's sights on their own last year, while 7.5 million chose organized packaged tours to travel inside Russia, according to the Federal Tourism Agency, citing estimates by Moscow's Higher School of Economics.
Russia's attractions are as varied as its 11 time zones, but local destinations are not always well-advertised or easy to reach.
"There are so many ads for different package tours abroad," said Sadekov, whose day job is in marketing. "And people normally go to places they hear about."
In contrast to colorful commercials for cheap sojourns to the beaches of Turkey — the most popular destination for Russians traveling abroad — information on interesting spots at home is often sparse. Sadekov hopes that his web site will make traveling in Russia simpler and more popular, he said.
Not everyone turning to the Internet to find traveling companions does so with the goal of exploring Russia. Their destinations and reasons for going online are as varied as the country's web surfers, numbering some 24 million people, according to estimates by the Public Opinion Foundation.
Just a few posts down from a group of fishermen searching on Mahnem.ru for "lovely ladies" to join them for an end-of-summer Volga River trip, a Hobbit-obsessed Katerina posted a message to find a ride to the Ural Mountains. Fellow J. R. R. Tolkien fans were staging a mock battle between magical forces of good and evil in the Urals, Katerina said, and she did not want to miss it.
On Poputchika.net, several Muscovites hoped to find the one or two people their group was missing to make a sailing trip in the Greek islands in August. Many other posts on the site resemble online dating pitches.
"People seem to use travel as a pretext for meeting someone," Deniskin said.
Alex, 37, who succinctly described himself as "single, normal," said he was looking for a "good, attractive" woman, willing to go on a beach vacation with him and split all the costs.
Poputchika.net, mainly used by 20- to 40-year-olds, was also flooded with announcements from women looking for a male "sponsor" to take them on a free vacation to any touristy spot.
Given that average monthly incomes remain relatively low — just under 11,000 rubles ($410), according to the Federal Statistics Service's latest figures — the desire to save money by sharing travel expenses appears to be a factor in the popularity of travel web sites.
The average cost of a non-package Russian vacation is 18,600 rubles ($690) per person, versus 20,500 rubles ($760) per person for a package trip, according to the Federal Tourism Agency. Going solo for either option, however, is normally more expensive than making the trip with at least one other person.
Tanya from Moscow turned to Poputchik.ru, another traveler-matching site, to find another female with whom to share the cost of her Tunisia vacation. Posts like Tanya's abound in the RuNet, whose users don't seem to be too preoccupied with safety concerns.
"I'm not afraid to meet people [online], since I met my husband through the Internet," Yekaterina Kanaki, a Greek-Russian translator, said in an e-mail. She wanted to catch a car ride from the Black Sea town of Yevpatoria back to St. Petersburg in August through the Mahnem.ru web site, Kanaki said, to meet interesting people.
Traveler-matching sites normally do not take any responsibility for their users' safety.
"We recommend meeting people before traveling with them," said Poputchika.net's founder Deniskin.
One just needs to use common sense when arranging travel through the Internet, said Sadekov, the creator of Mahnem.ru.
"It's the same kind of thinking as when you hail a car," he said.
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