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Grindr CEO George Arison is hoping to turn things around for the popular gay dating app after a tumultuous year with employees, investors and app users alike. He is focusing on moving Grindr beyond a hookup app, and in streamlining costs.

According to a feature in The Financial Times, an “a la carte” payment option for travel services will be added to boost the company’s revenue. Arison noted that travelling to events such as Aspen Gay Ski Week and New Year’s Eve in Rio de Janeiro is hugely popular among Grindr users, and the company sees advantages to offering those attending a way to connect.

Grindr is currently testing a feature called Teleport, which lets users place their profile in a new location for an hour to connect with others before traveling to that place. Tinder has a similar feature called Passport, where users can mark their location at a place where they are traveling.

A new study by OnePoll/ Forbes Health found that a whopping 70 percent of individuals who met someone on a dating app said it led to a romantic, exclusive relationship, compared to only 28 percent who said it did not.

The study comes as interest in dating apps has started to decline, in part due to the perception that dating app users feel they can’t find a long-term partner this way. Gen Z, the youngest market and the biggest demographic for dating app companies, have begun to look for alternatives to dating apps to meet people.

Millennials and Gen Xers feel differently. In fact, people between 43 and 58 years of age found the most success on dating apps, with 72 percent saying that meeting on a dating app led to a romantic relationship, according to Forbes.

Tinder has just launched a new online course in partnership with youth platform Yuvaa to educate young daters on consent.

The 90-minute self-learning course entitled “Let’s Talk Consent” will be available for free on the Coursera platform, and is intended to be a resource for young adults in India to learn about interpersonal consent.

According to CNBC, there are five main topics in the course: “understanding consent in personal relationships, setting and enforcing personal boundaries, recognizing signs of healthy and unhealthy relationships via red, green and gray flags, and navigating online and offline interactions with safety and respect.”

Dating app Bumble agreed to pay the state of New Jersey $315,000 in a settlement after the state’s Attorney General Matthew Platkin argued that the dating company violated state consumer protection and internet dating safety laws. The lawsuit alleged that Bumble allowed convicted sex offenders and other criminals on the app without warning other users.

Starting in 2020, the Division of Consumer Affairs launched an investigation into Bumble and Badoo dating platforms amid concerns of sexual assault occurring on the dating apps, and found that the company either “inaccurately represented their criminal background screening policies or failed to disclose them all,” according to NJBiz.com. They concluded that this violated the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and the Internet Dating Safety Act.

Bumble Inc. owns both Bumble and Badoo dating apps.

Tinder is expanding its AI-powered ID Verification feature to the U.S., U.K., Brazil, and Mexico, making it available by this summer.

According to the company’s press release, the new safety feature requires users to upload a video selfie and a valid Driver’s License or Passport. The AI-powered feature will then check to see if the face in the video selfie matches both the photo ID and the user’s profile photos, and will check the date of birth on the official ID.

The new feature adds another layer of security to using Photo Verification alone, where video selfies are compared to photos. Now, the official ID is also checked as part of the process.

Match Group signed a partnership deal with OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, which includes over 1,000 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses for company employees to help with their work-related tasks. Match Group noted that the press release announcing the move was written by ChatGPT.

While Match Group has been heavily focused on using AI to develop new features for its platform, this move incorporates it into the company’s internal workflow. Employees will use ChatGPT-4 to aid with coding, design, analysis, to build templates, and other tasks.

It will also help with marketing communications, although the press release is a bit over the top. As Tech Crunch notes, even though releases are designed to create buzz and excitement, Match’s latest announcement is heavy with love analogies and puns, which makes for a groan-inducing read.