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Kiersten Smith IS all set for her trip home for Christmas. She's booked her flight from Newark, N.J., to Chicago, made plans to get together with family and is wrapping up things at work. She's also lining up a blind date -- for the plane ride.
"The holidays are peak travel time," says the 31-year-old doctoral student in neuroscience, who has signed up with a new service called AirTroductions that promises to match single travelers who are booked on the same flight. "You never know who you'll meet."
In an age of online dating, where seasoned daters often judge a potential mate based on a scan of a Web profile or an email message, some singles are trying a more old-fashioned approach, immortalized in films like "When Harry Met Sally" and "It Happened One Night": bonding through travel. AirTroductions (slogan: "There's something in the air") has more than 18,000 members posting itineraries from Nigeria to France. Tripmates promises to help match members with people living or traveling to specific destinations.
Online exchanges can sometimes bloom into romance. Jerry Gray, a student at Harvard Business School, met someone on Tripmates earlier this year when he posted a request for advice on cool places to visit in Montreal. The 28-year-old from Cambridge, Mass., who was planning a weekend vacation with some buddies, soon heard from a 26-year-old female accountant from Montreal, who suggested a couple of bars and clubs.
Hitting it off on the site, the two decided to meet at a trendy restaurant during Mr. Gray's trip with his friends. The group spent the night drinking and dancing and the next morning, as everyone else slept in, the two paired off and toured the city. They've been dating ever since, despite the distance: "I plan to go to Montreal again in January," he says.
Informally, singles have been arranging similar meetings on their own for years through sites like Craigslist and FlyerTalk.com. But the newer travel match-making sites build on this informal practice, often using social-networking technology popularized by sites like MySpace.
At AirTroductions, users create a profile, view the details of anyone the site has found with a similar itinerary and correspond with them in advance. An AirTroductions profile of a 38-year-old member in Chicago lists knowledge of pop-music group the Pointer Sisters as a requirement for a good seatmate. And a 29-year-old York, Pa., member admits, "My biggest flaw is that I fall in love too easily, and almost always with the wrong woman."
But these sites don't always generate a match, for simple mathematical reasons: Often there simply isn't another traveler booked on the same flight. This problem has plagued AirTroductions member Michelle Baldwin. She signed up earlier this year and, despite traveling about once a month, she hasn't had a match yet. "I was thinking, 'Jeez, there has to be someone I can talk to,'" says Ms. Baldwin, a 33-year-old publicist and events coordinator for Fulcrum Publishing in Denver. "I did email several women about sitting next to [them], but it was pretty clear they wanted to meet a guy."
AirTroductions Chief Executive Peter Shankman says it's still early days with these services -- his site yields only a one-in-four match. But while AirTroductions doesn't advertise its services, Mr. Shankman believes more users will sign up as the word spreads and the odds of being matched increase.
Mr. Shankman was inspired to launch the site during a 2004 flight he took from Houston to Newark: his seatmate was a former Miss Texas. "It was a four-hour flight that took seven seconds," he says. Although the pair chatted the whole way they never met up again. The year-old site has created 2,500 matches. While it's free to join, users are charged $5 for each message sent to another member through the site (although it's free for the recipient to reply).
Sites say they're tapping into a lucrative segment of the travel market. According to a recent survey of 8,449 single people in the U.S. by Mintel International Group, a market-research firm, 61% had traveled domestically in the last year, spending an average of $438 on a domestic airline ticket. And during the holidays, business is especially brisk: More than a third of singles feel extra pressure to be dating or in a relationship during the winter holidays, according to a recent Match.com survey.
Many traveler-matching sites emphasize that dating isn't their only -- or in some cases even their primary -- function. AirTroductions also serves as a networking tool for business travelers, who locate fliers in similar industries. Tripmates says it's also a place where travel enthusiasts can share tips and solo travelers who don't want to spend a whole trip alone can find companions. Founded in August by a group of travel-loving friends, the site has built up a membership of 6,000 and draws most of its revenue from advertising.
Hitchsters is a site that matches users on taxi rides to and from New York airports so that people can save money by splitting the fare. The company says it doesn't market itself as a social network, but does let people specify the gender of their requested ride mate, and socializing is considered part of the process. Hitchsters founders Terry and Gloria Crawford say they started their free site, which has about 1,000 members, largely on a whim. The married couple have yet to try to generate any revenue from the site -- Terry works as a lawyer and Gloria is a homemaker -- though they may begin hosting advertising as their client base expands.
Some psychologists warn that the holidays can be a precarious time for singles, especially for those looking for company during the holiday season. Clinical psychologist Elaine Rodino, whose specialties include relationships counseling at her practice in Santa Monica, Calif., says that it's important to maintain perspective: "You're not necessarily finding the love of your life. Just because you have a nice Christmas or New Year's with someone doesn't mean it has to be forever."
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