For dating in Thailand, use a mainstream dating app and say plainly what you want, then add friends, work, classes and daytime places, and stay long enough in one city to meet twice. Free versions are enough to start. Which site you pick matters less than whether your messages sound like a visitor after a holiday girlfriend.
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Thai women are running their own checks on the men who write to them, and they compare notes in Thai. On Pantip, the Thai web forum where people swap dating advice, they tell each other how to look a foreign man up, which invitations to turn down and when a sweet message means he is planning his holiday rather than a relationship. This guide puts what they say next to the questions men bring to the subject, so you can see your first message the way she will.
Best Thai dating sites and apps: which one to use
The best Thai dating app for you is the one the women you want to meet already use, and for most purposes that means a big, mainstream app rather than a site built to sell foreign men an introduction. Start there, write a profile that says how long you’re in Thailand and what you’re looking for, and add a Thailand-focused site only if you’re not in the country yet and want to talk before you arrive.
Men ask about the site far more than anything else. Of the 40 different wordings of this question in our records, 31 name a site, an app or a service; only two ask how to meet women at all. It’s a sensible place to start and a poor place to stop, because the app only decides who you can see. Who answers you, and who agrees to a coffee, depends on what you write.
The app decides who you can see. Who answers you, and who agrees to a coffee, depends on what you write.
There are three kinds of place to look:
- Mainstream swipe apps. Thai people use the same global apps as everyone else. When a Thai social-media monitoring firm read a month of Thai posts about dating apps in May 2024, one global swipe app drew about three in four of the app mentions. 1 You’ll meet Thai women with ordinary jobs and lives here, and also plenty of visitors, so say what you want.
- Sites built for meeting Thai women. These are aimed at foreigners and are free to join, with limits on what you can do before you pay. They’re useful before a trip, if the app you use only shows people near where you are now.
- Social media. Facebook groups and Instagram, where a message or a group membership tells you nothing about who someone really is. More on that below.
The same Thai report sorted what those posts were about. About four in ten told how someone found a partner on an app; about one in five warned of scammers posing as dates, and another fifth were about partners cheating through apps. Of the app users the posts described, only about a third were there to find a partner at all; the report says others met scammers pushing investments or online shopping, or people after something short. 1 These figur