Pinterest Categories Makes Cruise Planning Easy

Beginning your cruise search on Pinterest starts with Categories. Pinterest uses categories

Pinterest screen shot — Starting your search begins with Categories.

The visual content found on Pinterest represents an entirely different way to search for a cruise.

Unlike a very linear approach found on a traditional search engines like those offered by cruise lines’ or travel agency web sites, Pinterest presents images for users to connect with instead of words. Although there are words associated with image pins, they tend to be secondary and not a main motivator.

The primary place users are storing pins is in the Travel & Places Category on Pinterest

Pinterest’s layout is especially well-suited for social sharing of images

Pinterest Travel and Places Category Screen Shot

Users looking for interesting images to help plan a cruise vacation can start from scratch looking at images on the Travel & Places Category on Pinterest. The images auto-populate the screen and users can keep scrolling down until they see something interesting.

Image found: Repin, Like or Comment

Once an image is found, users can execute the following actions: Repin, Like or Comment.

Repin images to save them to your inspiration boards
Like images to show support
Comment to engage with the Pinterest community

Intersting Photo from Pinterest Screen Shot — Repin images you like to your image board, then share.

In the example above, I repin the image I like to my Cruise Travel: Destinations board. The board was created by me and contains places I want to cruise. Note the option to send your pin to Twitter to share with your Twitter followers, which is a good option for people that want to increase content engagement.

Finding Your Pins

Once you have created your pin boards and have saved some images, you can view your pins. Your specially created pins and repins are located on your boards.To get to your boards, go to the upper right hand side of the Pinterest screen and click the down arrow button next to your username. Once the dropdown menu appears, select Boards (this action takes you to all your boards).

Find the board you selected when repinning your inspiration image

Pinterst Screen Shot — Board with pins and repins for places I want to cruise

Next Steps

Looking over your collection of pins will show you places that you consider worthy of your next cruise destination. The next step is to find out more about the destination. This is where knowing where the source of the image comes from and using pinning restraint will come in handy.

Choosing images from cruise lines’ Pinterest accounts is a good way to find details behind the image. Images linking back to the cruise line will allow you to find out more information about a cruise itinerary, ship, pricing, and ports of call.
Choosing images from people you know with helpful websites is another good idea. For example, most of my images are sourced from my website. The pins are going back to AvidCruiser.com/CruiseBuzz. At the image source, I have accompanying details that put the image into context.
Try to stay away from images from Flickr and other photo sharing sites. These images usually end up in a dead-end and finding more information about an image for cruise planning purposes is not very helpful.

Cruise Buzz