Leveraging Pinterest as a family travel resource

Crowdsourcing apps such as Trippy, Tripl and Wenzani (to name a few) have revolutionized travel planning in recent months and years. For family travel, I prefer a different take: Pinterest.

As I’m sure many of you know, the service is an online pinboard, a place where you can organize and share stuff you love. When pinning for travel in general, it’s a great place to share ideas. When pinning for family travel, it’s an invaluable resource that soon might supersede the old-fashioned guidebook.

Here’s an example. This spring, when a buddy and his family were arranging their first-ever trip from New Jersey to Southern California, my friend’s brother, who lives in Los Angeles, started sharing potential destinations on Pinterest. He titled the board “Petersons in LA: Just a few ideas of things we can do during the Peterson 2012 visit to California.” [sic]

Ultimately, when my bud’s family got out here, they did a bunch of stuff the brother had pinned, and had a great time.

Since these friends turned me on to the idea of Pinterest for planning family travel, I’ve stumbled upon other kick-ass boards (like the one here, and here, and here) that do just that. Why does Pinterest work so well for this kind of group-think?

• Once you pin a link, the content changes dynamically, meaning the nitty-gritty details never go out of date (I write guidebooks, but this gives Pinterest a huge advantage over those).
• It’s a lot neater than sharing ideas via a Word file or Excel spreadsheet.
• You can check out other boards on the same subject or destination for inspiration and ideas.
• The pinboard effect, which looks like a scrapbook, helps younger kids visualize the stuff they might be seeing, and enables older kids to click through and learn more on their own.

What’s more, the site offers a Group Board feature, through which multiple users can pin and trade ideas. (My buddy’s brother did not implement this, but he could have.) For tutorials on how to leverage Pinterest to help plan your next family vacation, check out primers here and here.

Got other pointers or cool family-travel pinboards to share? Feel free to do so in the comment field below.