You don't need to be a travel enthusiast to know that travelling takes a lot of money. However, a man seems to have proved that wrong by using the popular dating app Tinder to travel around Europe without spending a penny on accommodation.
For those who aren't aware, the dating app is generally used for hookups and not travelling. However, 25-year-old Anthony Botta from Brussels, Belgium, put it to good use by doing both.
Anthony visited eight countries in two months, staying only in the homes of women he'd matched with on Tinder. He went to 20 different cities and stayed with 21 women along the way.
He has named the process "Tinder-surfing" and shared the pictures and videos of his journey on Instagram and YouTube.
Anthony uses Tinder Plus — a paid-for setting that allows a user to choose the city they want to match people in.
He said his journey has been good and bad, but he has "learned a lot about himself" on his travels. In his two-month trip, he travelled to Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
"I'm not really picky because, in the end, all I am looking for is a place to stay," Anthony told the Independent. Though he hopes to meet someone he is attracted to, "that's not always possible."
In the desperate hopes of finding a roof for the night, sometimes he ends up swiping right on every profile he comes across.
"The ladies, at the end, just need to host me. They don't need to be like supermodels, but a couple of times I couldn't find a host, so I just thought I'll match everyone," he explained.
However, it's not that everyone he approached readily welcomed him. The multilingual traveller got a common response that it's really cool but it just wasn't for them.
"I managed to find a host in every city I wanted to go to except for Vienna, so I just went straight to Bratislava as it's only an hour away," he said. "After a few days I found out I couldn't spend three hours a day just chatting with Tinder explaining what I was doing."
To cut that short, he came up with a plan where he would "break the ice with 'You are my first match in the city' and then whatever the lady would text back I would send her the link of the trailer video that is on my YouTube channel followed by 'wanna be my host?'"
Despite travelling to eight European countries and staying with 21 women, Anthony is not satisfied and admits that he wants to go further. He's now back in Brussels and is working there, but still sometimes Tinder-surfs when he can.
