Will Pinterest's new "Place Pins" maps feature get hotel brands more serious about using the site?

In a not-so-surprising announcement last week, Pinterest launched a new feature called "Place Pins" that is devoted to travel inspiration and planning.  It's designed to combine the beautiful imagery one would find while browsing travel magazines/blogs with the functionality of a map and location details.  Best of all, users can share their Place Pins and collaborate on trip planning together.  On the down side, the map locations are powered by Foursquare, which anyone living outside the US will know results in major gaps in location info.

Given the popularity of pinning travel destinations on Pinterest, it wasn't a real shocker that the company finally launched a formal product built around travel.  The company disclosed that last year it had identified a significant trend of users creating boards just for destinations.

But what is really surprising to me is how few hotel companies, travel agents, and tour operators have embraced Pinterest as a way to inspire travelers through the use of imagery.  It's only fitting that a visual site like Pinterest would be a super valuable tool for travel companies to build up strong brand associations and awareness . . . especially the upmarket brands that seek to promote an aspirational travel lifestyle.  Pinterest has a massive user base that's just begging to be inspired, as evidenced by over 750 million destination pins to date all over the world.  Although Pinterest falls short of helping inspired customers book their travels (for now), there's still enormous value in hotel or travel brands engaging with would-be travelers on the site and possibly moving them closer to their respective purchase funnel.

In fact of all the global hotel chains, the only one with a strong presence on Pinterest is Four Seasons.  If the number of pins and followers is used as the comparative metric for engagement, then Four Seasons just absolutely blows away its hotel peers on Pinterest.  The company has a strong suite of pinboards but also was the first of its peers to create a Place Pins board.  Surely there are other upscale/luxury brands in the market that could learn a thing or two from Four Seasons' approach to inspiring travelers through imagery.

Below is a quick and dirty list of global hotel chains and their number of pins and followers.  Just for kicks and giggles I added Airbnb's stats.  They have just about the same number of pins as Intercontinental Hotels IHG Rewards Club, but with 33x the number of fanatic followers!!!

Four Seasons - 3251 pins and 24117 followers
Hilton HHonors - 1646 pins and 1357 followers
Hyatt Hotels - 1318 pins and 722 follower
Marriott Resorts - 902 pins and 1184 followers
IHG Rewards Club - 670 pins and 483 followers
Starwood Preferred Guest - 296 pins and 1330 followers
Hilton Worldwide - 224 pins and 1566 followers
Airbnb - 552 pins and 15876 followers
Intercontinental Hotels - no centralized pinners

I'd like to give a shout out to Airbnb's Place Pins board called "Loved by San Franciscans."  SF is easily my favorite city I've ever lived in, and this board is a nice walk down memory lane (complete with map and all)!