Miss Travel - Luxury Golf Trips... Free for Beautiful Ladies?

Adare Manor Hotel & Golf Resort via Kiwi Collection

Do you ever daydream about luxury golf travel?

You know, the kind where you tee off on a breathtaking course, stay at a stellar resort and dine in the finest restaurants?  I'm guessing almost anyone who plays the game does from time to time. Or perhaps, constantly.

Alas, these luxury golf trips are, by their very nature, extremely expensive, and the lush green fantasies they inspire, rarely transcend the seaside greens and cloistered villas of the would-be traveler's imagination.

However there's a unique new website that may allow some of those fanciful daydreams to become realities, albeit only for a select subset of daydreaming golfers.

The site is MissTravel.com and you may well have heard of it. It's certainly provocative, and quite polarizing if the Twitter buzz is any reflection. But I'm not here to opinionate. 

The fact is, Miss Travel has garnered quite a bit of media attention, quite quickly.  In its three weeks of existence it's been featured on CNN, Foxnews, and practically every morning show known to man.  The news, gossip and travel blogs have been buzzing about it as well, with posts appearing on HuffPo, Fodors, Gawker and International Business Times, to name just a few.  For those who've somehow missed it,  I'll let Miss Travel's attractive animated representative explain the concept:



So that's what were talking about, a kind of market-driven dating site, built around the travel niche.

If the market-driven dating idea sounds familiar it's probably because Miss Travel's founder is none other than Brandon Wade who you may remember from one of our previous golf dating stories.  That post introduced What's Your Price, a dating site Wade founded a couple of years ago... one that, like Miss Travel, relies upon a couple of much-lamented, often-refuted... but ultimately undeniable... dating marketplace realities: 1. that for women, attractiveness can be a negotiable commodity  2. Men are sometimes often willing to reward beauty in the dating marketplace.

Not surprisingly, most of the press coverage for Wade's sites has had a cynical, sanctimonious, or just plain outraged edge... as has much of the Twitter banter, and ironically, that's probably part of the reason the membership is growing so quickly.

However, it seems to me that quite a few of those claiming to be scandalized are merely resentful that this particular site so openly serves... facilitates... glorifies... the inherently unfair and exclusionary side of the way dating generally works in our social world.   

Lets face it, whether people meet on websites or at work... in bars or at social events... the general tendency is that wealthy men tend to pursue attractive women and attractive women tend to end up with wealthy men.  Right?  I say generally because yes, beauty is essentially subjective and... to a certain extent... so is wealth, but this doesn't undermine a broad general consensus as to what constitutes both prettiness and prosperity.

I'm guessing the gorgeous young woman who meets her wealthy older date on Miss Travel isn't any more likely to be a Gold Digger than the one who meets hers on eHarmony... or at a party... or at church, but yet that was the descriptive used by numerous bloggers and commentors when referring to Brandon Wade's latest venture. Some of them even went so far as to employ the Kanye video with Jamie Foxx for context.

The fact is, human egos are fragile things to begin with, and the dating scene, like nothing else, tends to heighten their fragility, so it's not surprising that so many men were quick to scoff at the idea that they'd ever have to pay a woman to spend time with them... while numerous women scorned the idea of being judged by... and selected for... their beauty.

My point is that Miss Travel is arguably an honest, open acknowledgment of the way some many people choose their dates and it surprises me that so many people are saying it's simply a form of prostitution... but then again, the same has often been said of marriage, hasn't it?

OK, I'm married, and even though my husband is an open-minded, enlightened, French man, I don't think I'll be signing up for a Miss Travel account any time soon... but if I were single and considering using a dating site, I might consider it. What about you?  Would you ever use Miss Travel or do you think it's just plain wrong?