Pin My Map for expats and immigrants: telling everyone you are home

Anyone who has moved abroad knows the trip home has a logistics problem. You have a week, maybe two. You have family obligations. And you have a long list of people who would want to see you, most of whom you will not manage to tell. Pin My Map tells them for you.

So you message the ones you remember, in a rush, from the airport. A few weeks later someone says "I did not even know you were back", having worked it out from a photo. That one stings, because it was never about not wanting to see them.

Pin the trip once. Everyone knows.

Add the dates you will be in your home city to Pin My Map, and the people you have shared future trips with are told.

No round of individual messages. No list to forget someone from. No explaining the same plan eleven times.

The ones who can make it will say so. The ones who cannot will at least know you were there, which turns out to be most of what people wanted.

It works in the other direction too

Your home base on Pin My Map is the city you live in now. Friends and family planning a trip can see it.

So you hear they are coming while there is still time to plan something, not the week before when everything is booked. People visit the places where they know someone. Being on the map is how you get visited.

You choose who sees what

A trip home is not always something you want broadcast. Sometimes it is a funeral, or a fortnight where you genuinely only have room for family.

Pin My Map lets you share a single trip with one tag, or hide it from specific friends, without changing anything else on your map.

Two cities, one map

Living abroad splits your life in half, and the halves stop knowing about each other.

Pin My Map is a small thing. But it keeps both halves in view: the people you left, the people you found, and every time they are about to overlap.