Pin My Map for frequent travellers: stop asking the internet

If you travel four or five times a year, you have done the research ritual enough times to know it is broken. You search. You get the same handful of places everyone gets. You book something fine. Then you find out a friend knew exactly where you should have gone. Pin My Map exists to close that gap.

It is a map of your own friends, showing where each of them lives, where they have travelled, and where they are going next.

Check Pin My Map before the search engine

The first useful question about a new city is not "what is good here". It is "who do I already know who has been here". One sentence from someone whose taste you know beats a page of stranger reviews.

Open Pin My Map, filter to the region, and see. Sometimes nobody has been, and you research the old way. Often enough, two people have, and one of them lived there.

Pin the trip before you go, not after

A past trip is a memory. A future trip is an invitation. Add it to Pin My Map before you go and three things happen on their own.

• Friends who live in that city see you coming.
• Friends with overlapping dates spot the overlap.
• Whoever already went sends you their list, unprompted.

Layovers count

Some of the best short reunions come from a five-hour connection nobody thought to mention. Pin the stopover too. The worst case is that nothing comes of it.

Build the habit backwards

Add the trips you have already taken, even quickly, even without dates. Your past trips are the part of your Pin My Map that other people get value from.

It takes one evening to fill in a decade of travel. After that, you are the friend people ask.