The image and video social bookmarking site Pinterest launched a travel-planning tool last Wednesday at its headquarters in San Francisco. The company has called it Place Pins. The feature allows users, or Pinners, to pin articles and images about attractions and interesting spots on geotagged maps on their pinboards.
Destination pinboards from travel industry tsars, such as Fodor’s, Conde Nast Traveller, and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, accompanied the product’s inauguration. Users may be inspired to create their own place boards by perusing the feature’s uses explored by the panel of travel experts. These introduce viewers to favourite haunts of Parisians, adventure options in South Africa, and where to get the best American BBQ, among others.
Users can access and update Place Pins through their computers and mobile apps, which are compatible with iOS and the Android operating system. Pinners can re-pin information from other users’ place boards and e-mail their travel pinboards to other people to contribute trip-planning suggestions.
Rich pins deliver the details
Place Pins are in Pinterest’s other “rich pins,” the suite that is used for recipe sharing and shopping. Before the advent of rich pins, the typical pin consisted of an image or video with a link at the bottom to the related article, with users opting whether to include a description. Rich pins provide expanded information. With place pins, people have access to instant place data from Pinterest partners, including Foursquare, TripAdvisor, and Open Table.
Pinning for travel industry profit
Pinterest, with its worth estimated at $3.8 billion in October, did not reveal plans for monetizing Place Pins. The feature, however, has broad implications for travel marketing. To begin, advertisers can harvest market information from user pinboards. For now, Pinterest states that it does not intend to attach a travel-booking product to Place Pins.
Pinterest’s mission is to encourage users of its free service to turn dreams and desires into actionable realities – out of the armchair and into the world. The release of Place Pins is an assertive move toward realising travel industry profits from the 1.5 million places users have been pinning to their site content every day.
You must be logged in to post a comment.