Elena’s Models Review

After some months of being absent I decided to goa round reviewing some new websites. In this occasion I want to share my opinion about “Elena’s Models”, one of the largest dating sites which has been running since 1999 (originally with the name of Russian Personals). It is a dating site focused on women from Eastern Europe: Russia, Belarus and Ukraine mostly. If you are wondering if this site is legit or not, here I give you my experience.

Registration is free but it is manually approved by the administrators. This process can take several hours but I found it great, as it gives some degree of security for the users in the website. As a matter of fact I need to congratulate the site for one fact: I gave a fake name and a fake address (as I am merely doing a review), they caught me on the spot by manually checking the profile and my IP Address. Uuups, my bad, after a couple of messages and being honest about my intentions they approved my free account. And yes, this is a good sign; they are indeed trying to protect their community!

Once registered, Elena’s Models gave me a great impression: clean interface and with immediate access to meet women. As a free account you are able to start browsing profiles. They have a really detailed system filter which allows you to look for women according to their physical appearance and also other aspects such as education, languages, if they have children, among several other aspects.

You will immediately find pictures that draw completely your attention. But here jumps the first limitation: you can only see a single picture of a girl, and you cannot communicate directly with her. Here’s where the paying methods start, the first one being the “EOI” (Expressions of Interest). These are invitations to start communicating with someone, if she accepts you can start talking with her immediately. As a free account you are allowed to get some EOI for free if you fill in details about yourself. This is a great way of starting with the right foot and meet people.

The women of the website look genuine persons. The photos vary between girls with top model looks but also plenty of pretty girls like you would find in a normal day walking at the mall. You can browse profile with a lot of details including physical appearance but also with their preferences. I did a reverse search of several profiles (using Google Images) and I found really few pictures posted in other websites, and the ones I found, were mostly on VK (facebook in Russia) or simple newspapers. This too gives me a really good impression.

There are several interesting features that make Elena’s Models outstand to other websites, just to mention some of them:

• Not all the women in the site are able to speak English, but that won’t be a problem with the incorporated Translator. The results are a little messy (sort of Google Translate) but are good enough to allow communication with other users. Their translator supports English, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian and Ukrainian.
• Meet Russian women all around the world. Because let’s be honest, not everyone is going to be able to travel all the way across the world to meet the woman of their dreams. That’s why Elena has included some sections to browse for Russian women abroad (USA, Europe, Asia, or wherever you can imagine).
• A super friendly website. Elena’s Model interface reminds me a little to Baidoo: everything is clear and the navigation is intuitive. On top of that they have a super-b blog in which they talk about all related topics: online dating, facts about Eastern Europe country, suggestions for success, and much more. I invite you to take a look to their blog as its perhaps one of the best features of the site.
• Fair policy about response time. Elena’s Models is aware that one of the biggest dissatisfactions of dating sites is sending messages that cost and not getting replies. In this case we are talking about Expressions of Interest, if a woman replies positive one of your EOI but there is no communication at all, you will get your EOI back. If a lapse of 30 days pass and the woman doesn’t answer you won’t be losing any money. I can’t express how nice this policy is.

There are two membership plans: Gold, Platinum and Ultimate. The gold membership starts from $28.80 USD a month and allows you to have unlimited communication with 50 members. The platinum membership allows communication with unlimited members in addition to access to live video chat and access to contact details, this for a price of $83.17 USD per month. Finally the Ultimate membership compromises Elena’s Models to verify the profile of the women you may be interested with in addition to Coaching assistance provided by them. The prices mentioned were taken in August 2015, there are also discounts if you acquire membership for certain periods (3, 6 or 12 months).

I was not able to test the gold membership (maybe later on I should invest some money as the site gave me a good impression overall). I guess that this membership option should be better on the long run than the traditional “pay per message”. For $129 you get unlimited messages, which is already better than other websites where each message costs $1 to $4 dollars.

Overall review

Strongly positive. The site may be one of the most honest sites around, and definetly is not a scam. Still, there seem to be some fake profiles around and some scammers going around (as comments in some forums mention), but the manual check of profiles and the honest policies make this site a safe place to meet people. ScamAdviser give the website a safety of 95% with really few negative feedbacks.

As with any other dating site: just be careful and stick to the suggestions of the website itself.

I wish you all a great stay at Elena’s Models.