Pinterest Officially Announces Its Foray Into Travel, With Place Pins
Skift Take
Pinterest has officially announced its entry into the travel industry, with the formal announcement this evening of its new trip planning tools for users. Skift first reported on the impending launch last week.
The new launch is around what it calls “place pins”, where users can create boards based on location and add pins to them, with geo-location and other information. As Techcrunch reports from the launch event, the tool “adds a map, images, and relevant information to the pins, and allows Pinners to view the places they’d like to visit both online and on mobile.”
It is working with a slew of content partners to build these organized boards and populate it with information and media. On the backend that includes Foursquare (for its API), visualized over maps from Mapbox. On the front end, it is working with companies like Disney, Lonely Planet, Yahoo Travel, BBC Travel, Thrillist, Conde Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and other consumer travel media, some tourism boards including VisitBritain and NYC & Company, brands such as Burberry, Virgin America, and Four Seasons.
Media companies hope that the partnership will be a two-way street. “Visual storytelling is part of National Geographic Travel‘s DNA,” Carolyn Fox, Manager, National Geographic Travel Digital Media told Skift in an email. “And Pinterest.com/NatGeoTravel is a great place to showcase our efforts to an active, engaged audience. Using the new Place Pin feature, our readers can pin the articles and tips they love and take them on the road when they travel or share them on other’s boards who are planning a trip.”
The official blog post from Pinterest, announcing the launch, explains it in more detail:
Every day people Pin about 1.5 million places, and now there are more than 750 million Pins of these destinations on Pinterest. We asked ourselves, how can we help people turn their travel inspiration into reality? Today, we’re taking a first step toward that goal with Place Pins.
Place Pins were designed to combine the beautiful imagery of a travel magazine with the utility of a map online so you can share it with friends. You can access them from anywhere on your smartphone, too, which means you can find new places on the go and even get directions!
Place Pins also include extra details like the address and phone number right on the Pin so you can easily pull up useful info on a weekend adventure or before a night out.
Some examples of its new place-pin boards:
—East Coast Beach Crawl from the Travel Channel
—Gastronomic Travel from the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
—Top 100 Hotels in the World from Conde Nast Traveler
—Tour #UMich from the University of Michigan
—UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the UK from VisitBritain
—Loved by Parisians and Loved by Tokyoites from Airbnb
—Great American BBQ from Andrew Zimmern
—Bucket List Happy Hour Spots Around the World from Matt of Land Lopers
Congrats to @Pinterest launching its travel project Place Pins tonight. pic.twitter.com/By5a7I3t6i
— Skift (@skift) November 21, 2013
And here are @Pinterest's content partners on the travel product pic.twitter.com/OIqEVO12o5
— Skift (@skift) November 21, 2013
More to come.
Related Read: Pinterest Will Launch a Travel Channel to Push Users from Inspiration to Booking
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