cityswoon.com.au Reviews 2

I've been to a few CitySwoon events and the whole app-driven setup just kills the vibe for me. Instead of actually focusing on the person in front of you, you're staring at your phone, waiting for a buzz, then awkwardly wandering around the room trying to find the next date. I also missed rating someone because the app jumped ahead too fast, and that basically erased any chance of matching. The hosts at my last event were barely around when things went wrong, so you're left figuring it out on your own. After that night I caught myself thinking that something like jjlove.co doing real offline meetups sounds a lot closer to how dating should actually feel.

I've done speed dating over a number years, and have probably been to at least a good two dozen or more events with four or five different companies.

CitySwoon has been around for what feels like six or seven years now, and I've experienced their events once before Covid, and about four times after, including two this month.

Unlike other speed dating companies, where the tradition is that women remain seated in one spot, and the men rotate clockwise when the bell rings, CitySwoon is app based. This means you have to keep an eye on your phone (which is actually impolite to your date, I feel) and then have to go searching around the room for the other person - a bit of chaos every ten minutes.

Another issue with their app/website system is after you get the buzz to move onto the next date, if you don't respond to it quickly enough, it jumps straight to the next date, meaning you miss out on rating the date you just had. Yes, you can rate the day after on their website, but some people forget to do that, thus you miss out on a match. The old school way other companies would do it (and I felt better) was you'd be given a card and you'd tick yes or no, hand them to the host, and you'd get the next day the emails of those you matched with.

Another downside of CitySwoon is you get less dates with them, then you do other companies. Most others will aim for between 12 and 14 dates, while CitySwoon only allows you 8. What's worse, is that they'll be double that amount of the opposite sex at the same venue, so there's maybe someone you'd like to chat with, but you may not get matched with them, thus you miss out - annoying!

True, the system does allow you through their website to chat with women who attended but you didn't date on the night, HOWEVER they limit that to just two contacts. So, if there was three or four women you missed out on dating that you'd really like to chat with, bad luck, CitySwoon limits you to two contacts only.

The algorithm that sets up dates also seems poorly designed. One example was the first event I went to this month, I missed out on chatting with a woman who I liked the look of. I contacted her via CitySwoon's chat system, and we even had a video chat via the CitySwoon site. Then, on the second event I attended, guess which woman the CitySwoon site paired me up with for a date?! Surely, their system would have know we had previous contact, and should have paired us up with someone else - a let down, and cheated out of meeting someone new.

For the most part the hosts were fine, except on yesterday evening's event at The Penny Black when they didn't welcome anyone to the event and went missing for most of the time - including when I needed help finding one date (she had gone to the bathroom.) Luckily the bar staff were helpful, because the hosts were nonexistent at that time.

At the end of the day, it seems CitySwoon is more popular because they have more events, better advertising and they appear higher in search engines.
From a speed dating veteran, I feel they tried to re-invent the wheel, when they didn't need to, and have ended up with a tech-savvy, but inferior product.