Tech Assisted Holiday Romances Are a Real Thing

These cute stories of love and romance in exotic locales and beyond are brought to you by the #NewNormal, O2's mission to question, explore and understand how mobile is changing the way we act and interact as humans. Read more #NewNormal stories here.

Braces-wearing teens on their last holiday with Mum. Bench-pressing tough guys looking for a little tenderness. Adventurous nans on the hunt for a flamboyant toyboy. It's likely that – whoever you are, whatever you do and whatever you're looking for – at some point you will get on a plane and trust the miracles of science to send you hurtling through the air at 600 miles per hour to find love in a foreign country. And it's likely that whoever you are, you can be aided in your quest by a phone app.

While no one wants to imagine their nan feverishly swiping right to everyone on Tinder – mixologists in fedoras, 18-year-olds with the faces of children but a body like The Rock, grown men who list their education as "Hogwarts" – the reality of modern living means that holiday romances no longer have to be left in the unreliable hands of serendipity. Technology has completely changed the way we interact with other people when we're on holiday, enabling us to locate one-night stands, week-long flings and maybe even soulmates in strange and foreign lands. All you need is a phone, a finger and a bumbag full of desire.

Here are the stories of three people who used their phones and the apps contained therein to find varying degrees of romance on holiday. Happy hunting.

It was the final night of my holiday in Milan and my friend and I were "dancing" in an absurdly gaudy discotheque to generically shitty Eurodisco. The club looked like a circus and the clientele looked like convincingly lifelike sex dolls; everywhere, outrageously libidinous men, shirts open to the waist revealing thick Flokati rugs of chest hair, were gyrating at nothing, literally just humping the air. The women, their breasts like two beach balls trapped in sacks, made me wonder if they were single-handedly trying to relocate Silicon valley. As you can probably tell, the smell of sex hung heavily in the club that evening. But after six dry nights, I was feeling immune, as if I were trapped in my own little prison-bubble of celibacy wherever I went in this Eurotrash porn dungeon.

And then I saw him, perched against a wall right in the back corner of the club, illuminated only by the neon sweep of the disco ball. He looked just as bored, lonely and pissed off with it all as I did. I knew it could be a match made in purgatory.

I whipped out my phone, and logged on to every dating app I had in rapid succession to see if I could find out his name. I narrowed the search radius on each down to the lowest setting, and by the time I got to the fourth app, my sullen Romeo was in my crosshairs. Cesare. The wind outside my window still sighs his name every night.

Needless to say, I went home with a lot of good memories, mainly consisting of a shared existential bitterness that quickly escalated, as it usually tends to, into a wild night of carnal ecstasy, chain-smoking and playing depressing music from our respective Spotify playlists. Without my apps, I doubt we'd even have been able to rouse the enthusiasm to talk to each other.

I was somewhere in the middle of the continental train holiday my friends had booked with Interrail's Rail Planner app, to help me get over a recent split with my ex. Every year, the German city of Frankfurt holds a six-day festival to celebrate its most famous export. That's right: my friends thought it would be hilarious to aid my recovery from earth-shattering heartbreak by taking me to a literal sausage fest.

I must have been on about my tenth hot dog of the day and with each chew I was growing more and more glum. Why would my friends do this to me? Why couldn't they have taken me somewhere Balearic to fuck the pain away, like normal mates would have done? The embarrassment, captured for the whole world (or at least everyone on my Facebook) to see in photos and videos, soundtracked by the jeers of my "pals", was almost too much to bear.

I slouched off to piss the jugs of German beer into some decrepit portaloo, when I noticed a girl in tears, prone in a heap on the floor. She bore an uncanny resemblance to my ex, who'd left me for her driving instructor some weeks hence.

Hope comes in odd and unexpected forms. It rarely takes the form of a balding, divorced, racist driving instructor. But sometimes it takes the form of a slip, a fall, fuelled by copious amounts of Krombacher. I spotted my chance. Running over, I tore my phone from my pocket, swiping away the notifications from guffawing Facebook friends revelling in the schadenfreude, and immediately booked an Uber. Within minutes it had arrived, and in the time it took to come I had used my sweet knowledge of the German language to strike up some kind of bond.

We stayed in touch on Skype and the next time she came to London, we met up and romance blossomed into a relationship that persists to this day, four years on. I have made sure in the intervening time to brag as loudly and as frequently as possible about it on Facebook.

I'd just touched down on the tarmac at Madrid airport and was yet to feel the first blast of evening humidity on my face when I disobeyed the instructions to keep my phone set to flight mode, logged on to Tinder, smashed the catchment radius all the way up to snare all the hotties in the city and sat back smiling as the matches rolled in. By the time the taxi dropped me off at my hostel, I had a date for the night.

His name was Antonio and he looked like a cross between Javier Bardem and an expensive leather wallet. I was entranced. I'd been yearning for a holiday romance of my own ever since a disastrous trip to Ibiza the year before when everyone had pulled apart from me, and I had to struggle to sleep each night against the ungodly volume of sugary alcopop in my bloodstream and the sounds of my so-called friends getting vigorously ploughed by builders through the thin partition walls of our apartment. Antonio was my salvation. He was my light. He was the key to righting all the wrongs in my world.

We met at a bar down the side street of a sun-soaked plaza and that's more or less when the problems started. He was very charming but his phone had died while I'd struggled to find the rendezvous point and Google Translate, the live translation app he wanted to use to ease the differences in language, had gone with it. We struggled manfully for a while – and I mean we really did give it our best shot, I was foggily able to recall the names of various foodstuffs from GCSE Spanish and we spent a good half an hour cack-handedly discussing the merits of jambon – but when la cuenta (thanks for lodging that one in there, Mrs Taylor) came and with it the time to progress things to a club, it was obvious that it wasn't gonna work.

Sadly, the language of love actually doesn't transcend all. I'm so sorry, Antonio. We could have had something so special together. Charge your fucking phone next time.

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