Well-travelled professional male, late thirties (well, okay, early forties), surprised to find himself back in the singles scene, just realised that the liberating pleasures of eating pizza in underpants, watching near-limitless televised sport and not having to spend another minute with dull relatives are counterbalanced by one significant downside — who is going to go on holiday with me? Who indeed?

When the chaps and chapesses with whom you shared countless free-and-easy holidays are now daddies and mummies, with whom does the single sort fly away? It’s scarcely a minority issue — the size of the single population living in the UK has increased by a huge 50% in less than two decades. An estimated 48% of the population are single. The sudden emergence of a girl-shaped hole in my own duvet added to the statistical weight, and left me wondering how to avoid single-room supplements, solo dinners and pitying looks on my next jaunt overseas.

But how about making a virtue of necessity? What if, via an electronic short cut, you could track down a travel companion while simultaneously engaging in a little evaluation of the opposite sex? Don’t panic, we’re not about to fumble into the nether regions of sex tourism, merely probing the possibility of combining a destination with an assignation. Sort of put the end within the means. All of which leads us to the world wide web.

The last thing that the fast-growing website www.companions2travel.co.uk (slogan “New friends, new places”) would like to be seen as is a dating site. Indeed, the many testimonials from the site’s members list not one incidence of prospective travellers e-mailing each other, chatting on the phone and unceremoniously booking a wedding chapel in Vegas, let alone a room in one of the city’s numerous motels.

None of that, however, made the e-mailed nod and wink from the friend who initially passed the site’s details to me any less painful. “They say it’s just a platonic thing,” he sniggered, “but I’ve heard it’s a rampant hotbed of singles eyeing each other up.” Clearly, married life had corrupted him badly: he thought he’d discovered Easypickings.com.

Inwardly, I screamed: is this what modern social interaction has come to — shopping online for the ultimate package deal? However, I quickly decided to put my singular prejudices aside and, in the selfless interests of professional investigation, signed up, so I could check out the talent. Anyhow, they had an offer on, so it only cost a tenner.

As this section’s Confessions of a Tourist regularly attests, travel can be a great aphrodisiac. It jumbles your chemistry, gets your juices fizzing. Well, you can put that sort of nonsense out of your head right here, because scrolling through the pages of C2T’s prospective travel partners is most definitely not (the website’s owners may be glad to read) romantic foreplay.

“Travel is my most favourite thing,” chirped Ms Sarah Brown, a clerical officer from Cleethorpes with, Lima be warned, designs on Peru.

“It is the people that maketh the country, methinks,” said Anna from Birmingham. She wanted to go to Niagara Falls with someone; the temptation to find a weak point in the safety railings would, I have to confess, be just too much.

Dave (all names and details here are changed, except, unfortunately, mine) is a 20- to 30-age-band accountant who kindly forewarns: “I’ve been known to enjoy a few beers once in a while!!” Exclamation marks and emoticons lurk in unexpected corners; they are nature’s way of saving you time and money.

At the last count, C2T’s membership had surged to nearly 8,000 potential partners, but my initial anticipation of finding someone I would happily tolerate as far as the check-in made me wonder if a sandwich board in the departure lounge at Gatwick would be a quicker option.

According to the site’s rules, you can’t e-mail anyone to sound out their travel aspirations before you’ve submitted your own “profile” to common appraisal. You don’t have to be a paid-up member to cruise the members’ pages, but all e-mails are passed securely via the website’s server, so your own personal e-mail is never (unless you voluntarily disclose it) revealed. What should I say? Tell it like it is, I decided. “I work in the travel industry and am often visiting far-flung (and not so distant) places as part of my research. Given that I usually work alone, I spotted this site and thought it would be interesting to take someone along, to make the miles more interesting.”

Okay, aside from the sinister use of the word “interesting”, for intellectual appeal, I sounded somewhere halfway between the Gideon Bible and the Corby trouser press. But I didn’t want to drive them too crazy just yet, seeing as so many applications would inevitably lead to heartbroken rejections.

I braced myself for the electronic flood. It was more of a trickle. Some were easy to ignore, coming as they did from men. Others were... well, call me shallow, but “pulse-slowing” would do it. Emily, unusually, had a picture on her page, and looked hot enough to melt the bed in minutes. Our initial e-mail exchange led, perhaps a little hastily, to a telephone conversation in which I swore I could hear tumbleweed drifting between us. My pulse was flatlining.

I was prepared to pull the plug and subscribe to Sky Sports when I met Amy. Okay, “met” is a tenuous word when our dialogue was typed. But she made me laugh at once, her incisive observations and succinct tips on how not only to survive but to enjoy solo travel signalling someone who wasn’t looking for a companion to complete her travels so much as to add to them. Just like me, I heartily reassured myself. Our subsequent conversations were tumbleweed-free, leading to the mutually agreed idea that we should meet for a day, just to be sure.

Only a doe-eyed fool would strike on the idea of meeting in Clovelly, the only place in England (unless you know better) with the word “love” subtly within its name. But as a convenient midpoint between our homes, it seemed only natural that our cars should nudge noses at the fishing village’s clifftop car park.

I arrived early, my nerves hardly assuaged by the fact that my hairstyle, within a minute of standing in the Devonshire breeze, was a scale model of the county’s trademark coastal tree. We walked, we talked, we talked some more and, to borrow an electronic term, clicked, swapping stories of luggage lost in Lithuania (hers) and homicidal maniacs outsprinted in Caracas (mine). When it came to teatime, a saunter down the slippery cobbles to the New Inn’s cosy lounge seemed more than inviting.

“A table for two?” the woman asked us. “Of course,” laughed Amy. “Two is just fine.” So far, we have yet to book the holiday, but we’re having fun looking at the brochures.

Membership of www.companions2travel.co.uk costs £25 for a full year. You can also look for solo travel companions at www.thorntree.lonelyplanet.com

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