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Pinterest for Travel Brands & Tourism Boards

Travelers decide where to go months before they book. Pinterest is where that decision starts.

By Logan McFarland · August 3, 2026 · 11 min read

Most travel marketing budgets chase people who already know where they are going: retargeting ads, branded search, email lists built from past guests. That leaves the earliest and largest part of the funnel unclaimed, which is the traveler who has not picked a destination yet. That traveler is searching Pinterest for “best time to visit,” “7 day itinerary,” and “what to pack for,” and whoever answers that search well gets remembered when the booking window opens.

Why Travel Decisions Start Months Before Booking

Nobody wakes up and books a trip to a place they have never considered. There is a research phase first, often stretching across months, where a traveler compares destinations, checks weather windows, prices out flights, and builds a shortlist. That entire phase happens on search and on visual platforms, and Pinterest sits at the center of it because it is built for exactly this kind of open-ended, image-led research, the same way it works for home renovation or wedding planning.

The advantage for travel brands is that 97% of top Pinterest searches are unbranded, meaning the traveler is searching “3 days in Lisbon” or “best hiking trails near Denver,” not the name of a tour operator or a specific hotel brand. That is good news for any destination marketing organization or independent property, because it means visibility is earned by answering the search well, not by having existing brand recognition. A regional tourism board with zero name recognition outside its own state can out-rank a national chain simply by publishing the more useful itinerary. That is the same unbranded-discovery advantage covered in our Pinterest SEO guide, and it applies to travel with unusual force because so much of trip planning is genuinely a cold search.

This is also why a destination cannot treat Pinterest like a same-week promotional channel. A pin published in June for July travel is arriving after most of the target audience has already planned their summer. The content has to be live while the decision is still open, which for most trips means months, not weeks, ahead of the travel date.

The Trip-Planning Funnel

Travel content earns nothing if it is aimed at the wrong stage of the decision. The funnel below is the shape that actually converts, and it explains why a beautiful destination photo alone rarely produces a click.

Pinterest content should be built for each stage on purpose. A “dreaming” pin sells the feeling of a place. A “planning” pin sells a specific answer: a 5-day Iceland itinerary, a packing list for a shoulder-season trip, a guide to which neighborhood to stay in. Most travel accounts publish almost entirely dreaming-stage content, which explains the save-heavy, click-light results a lot of destination marketers report.

The Seasonal Lead-Time Planner

The single biggest planning mistake in travel marketing is timing: publishing peak-season content during peak season instead of months before it. Pick a trip type and a travel month below to see a realistic publishing window.

Building and publishing a full seasonal calendar on top of running a destination or a property is where most travel marketing teams run out of hours. See how a real Pinterest content calendar is structured, or have 84Pins run the whole seasonal cadence for you.

Tourism Boards vs Hotels vs Tour Operators: What to Pin

These three travel-adjacent business types are often lumped together in Pinterest strategy advice, but they need different content because they sit at different points in the funnel described above.

A tourism board’s job is broad: cover the destination from every angle a traveler might search, because a tourism board is not selling a single stay, it is selling the decision to come at all. A hotel or resort’s job is narrower and later-stage: once someone has picked the destination, the hotel needs to win the “where do I stay” search. A tour operator sits in between, winning the “what do I do while I’m there” search. Keyword research clarifies which of these searches actually has volume in your destination, which is why we point travel clients at our keyword research guide before building the content list.

Pinterest vs Instagram vs Google for Travel Discovery

Travel marketers usually split budget across these three channels without a clear reason for the split. Here is how they actually differ for trip discovery specifically.

Qualitative comparison based on how each platform’s discovery mechanism matches the trip-planning funnel; not a ranking of overall channel value.

The practical read: Google wins the traveler who already knows what they want. Instagram wins the traveler who already follows you. Pinterest is the only one of the three built to win the traveler who has not decided anything yet, which is also the largest and least contested part of the funnel. A side-by-side breakdown of the platforms generally sits in our Pinterest vs Instagram vs Facebook comparison if you want the fuller picture beyond travel.

Matching Content to the Planning Stage

Seasonality is not the only timing variable in travel content. Content also needs to match where in the year the destination’s own peak season falls, and holiday travel behaves differently than the rest of the calendar. Our Q4 holiday strategy guide and seasonal content strategy guide both cover the mechanics of publishing ahead of a demand spike, and travel is one of the more extreme cases of that pattern because so much of the demand is genuinely seasonal rather than steady year round.

Illustrative recommended pin mix for destinations aiming to convert clicks, not just saves; adjust the ratio if your goal is pure brand awareness rather than click-through.

A destination optimizing purely for reach can lean more on inspiration content. A destination trying to actually move a traveler toward a booking needs the mix weighted toward planning content, because planning content is what answers a search specific enough to produce a click to the website.

Measuring Bookings When Attribution Lags

Travel is one of the hardest categories to attribute cleanly, because the click happens during research and the booking happens weeks or months later, often on a different device and sometimes through a third-party booking engine entirely. Track three things instead of chasing last-click credit: outbound clicks by pin with UTM tagging, on-site engagement from that traffic (itinerary page views, saved-trip actions), and assisted conversions in whatever analytics platform sits behind your booking flow. Our Pinterest analytics guide covers which metrics actually matter here versus vanity numbers that look good and mean little.

Common Mistakes Travel Brands Make

The same handful of mistakes show up across almost every travel and tourism account we review. Check yourself against these before assuming Pinterest “doesn’t work” for travel.

Publishing peak-season content during peak season instead of months ahead of it
Pinning almost entirely scenery and mood photography with no itinerary, packing list, or budget content
Sending every pin to the homepage instead of the specific guide the pin promised
Publishing in bursts around a campaign, then going quiet for months
Judging results by saves instead of outbound clicks and on-site engagement
Ignoring keyword research and guessing what travelers search for instead of checking

A consistent publishing cadence, built around your actual booking calendar rather than campaign bursts, is the single biggest lever most travel accounts are missing. See how 84Pins builds that cadence.

What This Means for Your Business

1. Publish for the season before it starts. Content live during peak season is arriving after most of your audience already planned their trip.

2. Answer the planning question, not just the destination’s beauty. Itineraries, packing lists, and budget guides earn clicks; scenery alone earns saves.

3. Track assisted conversions, not last-click. The click and the booking rarely happen in the same session, sometimes not even the same month.

4. Weight your content mix toward planning-stage pins if the goal is bookings rather than pure brand reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

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