A woman in Thailand
Here is the quick list of my top five dating sites in Thailand. I’ll go into more detail in my reviews later in this article.
Back when I first went to Thailand in 2008, dating via either your desktop computer or smartphone wasn’t really popular. There was no such thing as Tinder, and there were only a handful of dating sites out there.
Since that time, dating sites and apps have become mainstream. And although, you’ll have a bunch of options to choose from, there are really only a handful of dating sites and apps worth mentioning because the rest either don’t have high membership numbers, the quality of the people on the site is atrocious, or the interface requires an instruction manual in order to navigate.
Dating in Thailand can pay enormous dividends if you’re willing to put in the time to make it work. You’ll need to have a heavy dose of patience and set aside a large amount of time in order to scan hundreds of profiles and send personalized messages to those people whose profiles appeal to you.
Thai women are some of the most beautiful women you’ll find in all of Asia. If you’ve ever been to Bangkok or Phuket you’ll know what I’m talking about. Rest assured, when you sign up for one of these dating sites, you’ll see a bunch of amazingly attractive women.
Should you decide to sign up for the online dating sites I recommend below, be sure to read member profiles carefully as you might come across a lot of fake profiles as well as women who are not really women.
This thing about “women who are not really women” is truly something that is textbook Thailand. On some of the sites and apps I mention below, don’t be surprised to find 20% to 30% members of the third gender. I had never seen that kind of ratio in any other country.
By the way, you might be thinking, why not just download Tinder, and forget about the traditional dating sites? Later in this article, I’ll discuss why Tinder didn’t make my list.
Ok, without further ado, let’s dive into my reviews.
Chalida Vijitvongthong – Thai Actress (source: Wikimedia Commons)
1. ThaiCupid.com (a.k.a. ThaiLoveLinks.com)
ThaiCupid.com is the best online dating site in Thailand. If I only had money to spend on one site, this is the site that I would spend it on. At any given time, you’ll usually find more than 2000 people online. Also, if you do a search of women between the ages of 18 and 35 who have been active on the site within the last month, you’ll find over 1000 profiles.
Thai Cupid
ThaiCupid.com is run by one of my most favorite online dating companies, Cupid Media. Cupid Media owns sites that I’ve used in the past like BrazilCupid.com (I met my wife on this one) and Afrointroductions.com.
ThaiCupid users benefit from a number of strong features, including in-depth profiles, audio/video chat, and excellent anti-spam measures. If you’re a Thai local or you are looking to meet Thai locals, this site is a veritable gold-mine of potential matches.
Sign up Process
It is free to sign up, and the process is relatively painless.
To begin, either join with Facebook account, or put those fingers to work and type in your name, gender, email, and a password.
Next, fill out a short About Me section, tell ThaiCupid about your ideal match, and you’re officially good to go.
Now, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to take the time to finish your profile or continue on to use the site and start the search for your ideal match. If you decide to leave your profile as-is for now, I should mention that the site will occasionally prompt you with more questions to answer, which can be a minor annoyance.
How to Locate Potential Matches
Match-hunting will take you down two different paths: browsing and searching. Browsing involves looking at ThaiCupid’s match-recommendations and can be done fast or slow, viewing only photos, taking the time to look at full profiles, or options in between. The search feature is similar to browsing in that you can specify which kinds of profiles you want to see, but with a few more options for narrowing down your search.
How to Communicate with Other Members
If you genuinely want to meet people on ThaiCupid, you’re going to need to talk to them. And in order to do that with any regularity, you’re going to need to upgrade to a premium membership.
While you can communicate with other premium members without upgrading yourself, this is not a strategy to rely on. As a premium member, your options are greatly enhanced, with audio, video and IM live chats available to you. These are all excellent tools for vetting potential matches.
Unique Site Features
One of ThaiCupid’s best and most unique features is the breadth of its video messaging capabilities:
- Upload a welcome-video to your profile, sharing about yourself, and communicating your personality much more clearly than text and photos.
- Send a video message to a potential match, greatly increasing your chances of a response.
- Live video chat with other members. Confirm if their photos are genuine, and if you two are truly a good match.
What is Included in Each Membership Level
- Standard – Search for matches based on your preferences, send interest to any member, communicate with paying members
- Gold – All of the above, plus: Communicate with all members, audio/video chat, Instant Messaging, ad-free browsing, anonymous browsing
- Platinum – All of the above, plus: Rank above other members in searches, doubled profile space, VIP profile highlighting, platinum-exclusive search features, advanced matching algorithms, message translation
Thai Friendly
ThaiFriendly.com is a popular site in Thailand and makes a good second option.
ThaiFriendly is Thailand’s largest “free” Thai dating site, with around 830,000 members, over 3000 of which were online when I was writing this review.
As a mostly free site (with a premium membership available for extra perks), ThaiFriendly attracts a younger, more urban crowd than its main competitor I mentioned above, ThaiCupid. You’ll find members from all over Thailand, including Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Phuket.
You can do quite a lot on ThaiFriendly without ever paying a dime, but the premium membership includes enough features that it’s worth looking into. Overall, I enjoyed ThaiFriendly quite a bit and consider it a great second option.
Sign up Process
Signing up is fast and simple, requiring a username/password, email, birthday, height/weight, your gender and your gender of interest to get started. The next page prompts you to write a headline for your profile, a short blurb about yourself, and select your education level, language English and Thai language abilities, and if you have/want children.
To finish up, select your ideal match’s age range and location. Profiles are pretty sparse, with not much else to share other than what was completed during the signup process.
How to Locate Potential Matches
The standard browsing feature isn’t as fleshed out as other sites, but it works well enough. As a free member, you can filter by gender, age-range, and location, with height, weight, education and children as extended filter options for premium members. Profiles are shown with a photo, age, location and username, and can be further filtered to show only those who are currently online and have a photo.
ThaiFriendly will also label users who are new members. There is also a “Lists” tab, which includes profiles that have visited you, shown interest in you, or favorited you, and also those which you have visited, shown interest in, or favorited.
How to Communicate with Other Members
When browsing profiles, you have the quick option to “show interest in” or “favorite” those you like. When viewing a profile, you can send a message, basic text, including photos and emoticons if that’s your style. You can also comment publicly on their profile or individual photos.
Free users are limited to 1 message per 10 minutes. Premium users have unlimited messaging capabilities and can also open Instant Messaging chats with online users. At times you’ll come across a profile that is “receiving too many messages”, and to contact them you’ll have to upgrade to premium.
Unique Site Features
While primarily a dating site, ThaiFriendly has a few social-media-esque features, some of which felt more natural to use than others. For example, you can comment publicly on profiles. I never used this feature, as it’s not my style, but I did like the ability to comment on individual photos.
Personally I like to chat a bit with members first, and then use the comments. Others may enjoy these features as easy ways to open communication with profiles they like.
Finally, you can save your favorite photos, as another option of gathering a list of profiles you like, without publicly adding them to your favorites.
What is Included in Each Membership Level
- Free – Create profile, upload photos, show interest in profiles, add profiles to favorites, send 1 message every 10 minutes, comment on profiles
- Premium – Unlimited messaging, advanced search options, privacy control, increased message capacity, see who’s read your messages and viewed your profile
Asian Dating
AsianDating.com is a member of the International Cupid Media Network. The site has over 1 million subscribers.
As is common for sites in the network, AsianDating is a user-friendly website that is easy to navigate and use. The site offers both a free and premium membership, and like most sites, the free membership is fairly restricted while the premium membership offers a lot of wonderful features that users enjoy.
The biggest flaw I found on AsianDating was the large amount of spam messages I received immediately following sign up. However, there are a lot of real women and men on the site that are looking to meet other people, and the filters on the site do help to keep a good portion of the scammers out.
If you are looking to connect with a Thai woman, this site is a great place to look.
Sign-Up Process
Signing up for AsianDating was really simple. It took about 2 minutes and didn’t require any credit card information. You can sign up with your Facebook account or start from scratch and enter a few personal details like your name, gender, email address, and password.
Once the account is created, you’ll move on to creating a profile where you can share some information about yourself that you think potential matches might be interested in as well as letting people know what you are looking for in your ideal match.
At this point, the profile isn’t quite finished yet, but you have the option to start browsing through other people on the site to look for potential matches. If you choose this method, the site will periodically prompt you to finish the last few steps of the profile, and while this can be a bit disruptive, you can choose when and if you finish your profile.
How to Locate Potential Matches
You have two options when looking for matches on the site: you can choose to browse through the other profiles on the site, or you can use the search option.
Browsing will be at your own pace. You can look at photos and read through full profiles as you choose, one user at a time. This gives you full access to all the other members on the site, but can be time consuming.
The search feature is a bit faster and lets you create search criteria that is specific to what you’re searching for. There are a lot of search options including age, location, education level, whether or not users smoke, drink, or have other lifestyle preferences you may be searching for, body build, ethnicity, married or singles, and religion.
You have the option to save your search criteria so that you can use your custom search in the future as you look for new singles. I ran my custom search daily to find new singles that fit my criteria.
How to Communicate with Other Members
While the free membership allows you to search profiles, view them, show that you are interested in certain users, and save certain profiles to your favorites list, it doesn’t allow much in the way of communication. If you are truly looking to meet someone on the site, upgrading to a premium membership is the way to go.
While any free account can send a message, either the sender or receiver has to be a premium member to actually read it. By upgrading to the premium membership you guarantee that anyone you message will be able to read and reply to your messages as well as enjoy features like instant messaging, audio features, and video chats.
Unique Site Features
The best and most original feature of AsianDating is the translation tool for messaging. This tool breaks down the language barrier by allowing you to translate your message to any language of your choice with one click of the mouse. On a site that features a diverse group of people, this tool is invaluable.
What is Included in Each Membership Level
- Standard – Sign up, fill out profile, upload photos, customize searches, send interest to other profiles, communicate Gold/Platinum members
- Gold – All of the above, plus: Unlimited messaging and communication with other profiles (text, audio, video, Instant Messaging), ad-free browsing, invisible browsing
- Platinum – All of the above, plus: Rank above other members in searches, doubled profile space, VIP profile highlighting, platinum-exclusive search features, advanced matching algorithms, message translation
Bumble
As another option, I recommend you sign up for Bumble. I did a full review of Bumble here.
OKCupid
With OkCupid, there are no signup fees, which is why it has attracted about 30 million users. With this many users, your odds of finding someone are quite high, especially since the platform uses a wide-ranging questionnaire along with sophisticated algorithms designed to offer you the best possible matches.
However, because the site is free, there will be a certain number of suspect profiles and spammers among the lot that you’ll have to sift out. For the most part, you’ll have plenty of choices for whatever type of relationship you’re interested in, from casual hookups to falling in love, and everything else along the way.
Signing up
OkCupid makes it easy to sign up using your Facebook account, or you can do it manually by entering basic profile information. Next, you select your username and password; write a short description of yourself and briefly answer 5 questions regarding your personality.
When you finish that, you peruse the user profiles, selecting 3 that you “Like,” giving OkCupid an idea of what you’re looking for. Once that’s done, you can browse all you want.
It’s up to you how long it takes you to complete your profile. You’ll want to upload photos, fill in basic stats, and play around with the 8 different prompts.
OkCupid allows you to provide a ton of information about yourself, with thousands of questions you can answer if you wish. Some people plunge right in and love the idea of sharing a lot about themselves, while others prefer to keep things more private.
You’ll determine what your comfort level is for sharing personal information.
Finding Possible Matches
While perusing profiles, OkCupid lets users narrow their search by using various options to filter the choices. As you’re looking around, you’ll be viewing each person’s profile picture, username, his or her age and where they live.
You’ll then see percentages for “Match” and “Enemy.” These are OkCupid’s algorithm stats working on your behalf to compare and contrast your answers to their answers to the questions asked on the site.
You also have the option of using Quickmatch, a tool that presents other members for you to either “Like” or not. When the tool finds a match, both members are notified.
Communicating with Others
OkCupid gives you two main options for communication with other members: to “Like” and to Message.
When you Like someone, you’re really only bookmarking them in a way, since users are only informed of who has Liked them when they opt for the premium membership, which costs money.
You can message someone via text, and this is free and easy to do. A third, more indirect way to communicate with others would be to visit their profile since they will be notified each time you visit.
Unique Site Features
The most innovative feature of OkCupid’s site is their unique question matching system. There are a broad range of questions for members to answer, some fairly routine like, “Are you a morning person?” and others more risqué, as in “Are you fetish-friendly?” with some designed to reveal deal-breaking conflicts, such as “Is interracial marriage a bad idea?” and others, blatantly off-the-wall, such as “In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?”
As you’re answering questions, you point out which answers would be acceptable from others as well as how important the answer to this particular question is to you. Because there are thousands of different questions, the more you choose to answer, the more accurate your matches are likely to be in theory.
OkCupid will also look at all your answers to compile a personality profile on you, describing you as “More Adventurous” or perhaps “Less Kinky.”
Membership Fees and What is Included in Each Membership Level
- Free – Create a profile, browse, Like, and message other users
- A-List – Advanced search options, invisible browsing, message filtering, extra message storage, ad-free browsing, username changes, see who has liked you, and see when someone has read your message
- Incognito Mode – Lets you Like and visit profiles invisibly, hides your profile from searches.
- Profile Boosts – Appear more often in searches and at the top of the list in Quickmatch.
Honorable Mention: Tinder
Tinder gets an honorable mention on my list. If you’re in cities like Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or Phuket, you’ll likely get A LOT of matches on Tinder. Don’t be surprised if you get 100+ matches within a week.
But…as with everything in life…there is a catch.
1. Don’t be surprised if after chatting with a woman for a bit, she presents you with a list of “services.”
2. Because Tinder has such a huge user base in Thailand, you’ll have to spend a ton of time reading profiles. And yes, you do need to read the profiles. Don’t just look at the photos. Some members on there that you may think are women are actually members of the third gender.
3. Also, flakiness can be a real problem (as is the case everywhere in the world). While you might have a ton of matches, getting a woman to meet offline can be like pulling teeth. In my e-book, I go into detail about how to deal with this and when to ask the woman/man you’re interested in to go offline for a date.
Be Patient and Persistent
Don’t give up and be discouraged. Dating is a pain no matter where you are in the world. You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs to get results.
My advice is to sign up for one of the dating sites I discussed above, upload some photos, and fill out a complete profile. From there, reach out to members who pique your interest and take it from there. And, if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, download Tinder to see what that world is like for yourself.
Good luck!
Further Reading
Worldwide Online Dating Site Reviews: Be sure to check out my country-by-country reviews of the best online dating sites in the world.
Worldwide Moving Guide: Everything you need to know in order to plan your move to 65+ countries around the world.
Worldwide Jobs Guide: If you are interested in working in this country, be sure to check out my posts on how to find jobs in this country and other countries around the world.
Worldwide Apartments Guide: If you are interested in renting an apartment in another country, take a look at my articles on how to find an apartment in various countries around the world.
About Addison Sears-Collins
Hey! I'm Addison Sears-Collins, the founder of Visa Hunter. You can learn more about me here. Connect with me by liking my fan page on Facebook, connecting with me on Twitter, or check out my website Automatic Addison where I build robots and embedded systems.
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