Pinterest Expands to Travel Industry with 'Place Pins' Launch
Creative planning tool branches out, allowing travelers to share trips.
Nov. 21, 2013— -- Pinterest jumped into the travel realm on Wednesday, launching a new feature called "Place Pins," which allows users to make and share vacation plans.
The company stated that in the last year it had identified a significant trend of people using the site to create boards for destinations and "now there are more than 750 million Pins of these destinations on Pinterest."
The latest in a number of recent "actionable" updates to Pinterest, Place Pins offers users the option to add an interactive map to a board and pin businesses and attractions that are geotagged via Foursquare. Multiple users can also add to the same board, a boon to group trip coordination.
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Partnering with a number of veteran travel authorities, such as Fodor's, Conde Nast Traveler and Travel Channel, as well as brands such as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Place Pins launched with a number of pre-curated destination boards on subjects that range from "America's Best Hot Chocolate" to "My Little Paris" to "UNESCO World Heritage Sites."
A spokesperson for Pinterest told ABC News that there are no plans for Place Pins to send updates to users on pinned destinations, such as price drops on hotel reservation packages or other notifications similar to its "Product" category.
"Our goal is to inspire people to do things offline, but this is a free product and we have no intentions of building a booking product," said the spokesperson.
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But various users in the U.S. and abroad have already expressed frustration with the new feature, flagging the limitations of the Place Pins partnership with Foursquare.
"It doesn't work very well for Russia:( Can we create new places? Or can just choose from what FOURSQUARE has?" commented one user.
"I agree with everyone that using Foursquare as your points-of-interest database is incredibly limiting (especially outside large cities), rather than straight-up Google maps," said another.
Pinterest defended its choice in Foursquare partner, but stated that there will be more to come.
"We've found the Foursquare data to be accurate and comprehensive but we're also working with more than a dozen other partners, including Airbnb, Urbanspoon, and Jettsetter, to make sure that pinners can easily add accurate location data to a pin," a spokesperson for Pinterest told ABC News. "We plan to add additional partners and data sources in the future."
In the meantime, others expressed excitement.
"Took a short while to master but so far, I am loving it!" said Claire Furner, in the United Kingdom.
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