The rise of adventure dating services

The thing that most of the people partaking in activities with Meet Market Adventures have in common is their love for adventure. The outdoors club has branches in four Canadian cities: Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Montreal and boasts more than 80,000 members. The other thing they all have in common is that they are single.

“I’m here for adventure, I’m not looking for a guy,” says Julianne Webster, from the back of the jetboat which is racing along the waves of Lake Ontario, near Niagara Falls in eastern Canada.

This adventure involves a ride on a 1,500-horsepower jet boat around a whitewater whirlpool known as the Devil’s Hole. A total of 45 men and women each paid $100 to be there.

Julianne isn’t the only one who appears to be uninterested in making a date from the event. “I’ve probably been to a dozen events and it’s such a blast,” shouts a single mother out on the boat. “I probably won’t meet the man that I’ll marry, but it’s been loads of fun doing all of these crazy things.”

In fact, Meet Market isn’t the only company getting into the niche market of adventure tours for singles. Single Horizons provides a similar service in Ontario, while Introadventures operates from Canada’s west coast in Vancouver. In Calgary, Savvy Connections is a big player and Adventures for Singles operates south of the border in the United States.

Other more well established dating services have also got a finger in the pie. JDate is a dating service with more than 27,000 members in Canada The company recently launched JDate Extreme. “We’ve begun planning activities for our singles like bungee jumping, sky diving and white-water rafting,” says Gail Laguna, vice-president of communications for Spark Network, the company that owns JDate. “With adventure dating, worst comes to worst, even if you don’t meet anybody, you still had a great day. We believe this market will only continue growing over the next few years.”

Meanwhile the Meet Market says it has been experiencing a 350 per cent rate of growth over the past two years. When you think about it, it’s not hard to see why. What better way to break the ice than to huddle together as your boat hurls at high speeds around a whirlpool trying to suck you into its depths?