Carter Leathers was sitting at a table on the terrace of a boutique hotel in the center of Florence, Italy – sipping a Negroni and trying to quieten her nerves.

The courtyard was peaceful, open and airy, dotted with aperitivo-hour drinkers. Carter tried to soak up the Florentine vibes – and avoid checking her phone and reading the inevitable anxious messages from her mother.

Then through the stone arches into the courtyard, walked a tall, confident-looking guy in a blue suit.

This must be Max Ratzenböck, thought Carter.

The man was looking around the courtyard, and then his eyes met Carter’s. He started smiling, looking instantly pleased to see her.

This feeling was mutual. Carter smiled back.

“Wow, he looks good,” Carter thought to herself.

Carter and Max said their hellos. And soon Max was sitting opposite Carter, his own Negroni in hand.

“Once we started talking, we just kept smiling at each other,” Carter tells CNN Travel today. “We just hit it off.”

The decision to meet up in Florence no longer felt quite so crazy.

“Okay, yeah. This is going to work,” Carter recalls thinking.

An ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ trip

It was late August 2022. Carter, a 35-year-old esthetician from Sacramento, California, was on what she calls an “Eat, Pray, Love-style” vacation in Europe.

Earlier that summer, Carter had dated a guy in California and she’d hoped their relationship might go somewhere. Instead, it unceremoniously ended.

In the wake of that disappointment, Carter made a conscious choice to shift her priorities.

“Okay, I’m just going to go do my own thing. I’m not waiting for anybody,’” she thought.

With that mindset, Carter booked a solo trip to Europe.

“I said, ‘I’m just going to go and explore and kind of see what happens, and see who I meet,’” recalls Carter.

Carter was excited for a change of scene, a change of pace. She loves art and imagined herself whiling away afternoons in galleries in picturesque European cities – without having to accommodate a partner’s needs or requirements.

While putting together her itinerary, Carter knew Florence and Rome were non-negotiable stop-offs. But she wasn’t sure about her third destination. She weighed up options and in the end, she got inspiration from an unlikely place: an episode of reality television show “The Bachelor,” filmed in Vienna, Austria.

The episode included sweeping shots of the historic buildings and green parks.

“The city looked so pretty,” recalls Carter.

Flights booked and hotel reservations made, Carter decided to switch her dating app location settings to Vienna.

Carter’s app of choice was Bumble, which prompts women to make the first move in hetrosexual pairings.

“I was like, ‘Okay, let’s see what the guys look like in Vienna,’” Carter recalls.

And that’s when Carter saw Max Ratzenböck for the first time.

“As I started swiping, he was the second guy that came up and I was just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I hope we match,’” Carter recalls.

A couple of hours later, Carter’s phone pinged: Max from Vienna had liked her back. It was a match.

A dating app match

In the summer of 2022 Max was a 31-year-old Austrian comedian finding his footing in his personal life and career in the wake of the pandemic.

“I’d just moved into the apartment I’d always wanted to have – it was in the middle of Vienna, it’s an old apartment, a bit of a bachelor pad,” Max tells CNN Travel today. “I was acting and I’m a comedian. But since Covid, I left the stage, basically, because at that time, the stage was not really an option.”

Like many comedians in the wake of the pandemic, Max turned to TikTok. He found some success posting comedic videos there, and became focused on growing his social media audience, while also juggling his day job at an advertising agency.

“Basically that’s what all I was doing – meeting with friends and working – and then I took a chance on Bumble too,” says Max.

Max vividly remembers the moment he opened the dating app and saw Carter for the first time.

“There’s this gorgeous-looking lady on my front page,” he recalls.

Max was so struck by Carter, he remembers questioning if she was “even real.”

“I would get that question a lot, if I was real,” says Carter today. “They’d be like, ‘Oh this is a fake profile.’”

Max swiped to the right “immediately.” Then he got the notification: Carter liked him too, it was a match. Max couldn’t believe it.

“That turned out to be a very good decision,” says Max, of his decision to swipe right on Carter’s profile. “The best I ever made.”

Max and Carter started messaging back and forth right away, with Carter explaining to Max she was based in the US, but would be visiting Europe in a few weeks time.

Their messages were light, flirty, and friendly. Carter suggested Max could maybe show her around Vienna.

“I was totally, totally doing that,” says Max. “I blocked all my stuff out of my calendar to have four to five days to show Carter around Vienna.”