Pinterest travel, a beautiful way to plan your trip

AFAR on Pinterest

You’ve got your guidebooks, your travel magazines and your review sites to help plan your next trip, but do you know where your Pinterest pages are? While the Internet’s latest social media sensation is best known as a DIY crafting, design and shopping paradise, it’s also the mostcolorful, vast and timely new way to plan travel.

The visual bookmarking site, which allows you to save images from websites to virtual inspiration boards, just made itself even more travel friendly when it rolled out a new feature called Place Pins. The pins let you link your images to a specific spot on a map, allowing you to easily visualize the proximity of various attractions to each other. You can also use the pins to save places you want to visit and keep track of the places you’ve already been.

While Pinterest’s travel offerings are vast, a few boards really stand out. Travel site Jetsetter maintains a Daily Moment of Zen board where they post an image daily from one of their favorite destinations. Budget Travel also pins great pictures, travel tips, gifts and even DIY projects for those with wanderlust. Dave and Deb of the Planet D travel blog and AFAR magazine are two other Pinterest users to follow for gorgeous images and helpful advice.

The folks behind the travel app Roadtripper used place pins to create a board of weird roadside attractions across the country. Condé Nast Traveler has also created a fantastic guide to the islands of the Caribbean. For another excellent example of place pins in action, check out this board of Atlanta attractions you can’t miss.

After your trip, create your own Pinterest travel boards – it’s a great way to show off your vacation photos to friends and family. Just upload your images to Pinterest and, if you feel like it, use the place pins feature to link your personal pics to the exact spot where you took them.

For more on the nuts and bolts of setting up a Pinterest account, checkout this very thorough tutorial from the Ytravel blog (another great Pinterest user to follow).

And don’t forget to check out Orbitz on Pinterest for travel tips, giveaways, and inspiration!

Tagged: Destinations