Discovery and collection are what Pinterest is all about, and the Place Pins feature that the company introduced a couple of years ago is supposed to take those two things and apply them to the travel market. With the feature, users are able to take Pinterest’s unparalleled visual discovery ability and apply it to travel planning, and it ended up being so popular that the company has decided to expand it significantly. Earlier this week, Pinterest started adding information to billions of pins, ranging from business details to directions, in an effort to make Place Pins more useful, and that’s just the first step in what’s going to be a significant push into the travel market for the company.
If you often find yourself trapped in your cubicle, pinning exotic locales to your Pinterest travel board and planning lofty getaways, here’s an update that might appeal to your inner globetrotter: Pinterest is upgrading its Place Pins feature, opening up location data to a total of 7 billion Pins. Two years ago, Pinterest introduced Place Pins, in an effort to tap into the vast travel-planning market; the social network found that its users were increasingly using Pinterest to create boards devoted to their jet-setting aspirations and vacation plans. At the time, the company claimed that Pinterest users were pinning more than 1.5 million places on a daily basis. Today, Pinterest is doubling down on its efforts to make a dent in the travel discovery and planning market—one that a number of curatorial apps have attempted to tackle. The updates to Place Pins will allow users to not only discover new places, but also plan how to visit them and learn more about them. With a tap, Pinterest users will be able to find directions to a pinned location via Google Maps, as well as check out reviews and visit relevant local websites.
