Pinterest launched a new travel hub called "Find Your Routes" to inspire safe travel and highlight black travelers. Cheddar News dives deep into the social media giant's new platform for Black History Month.

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Pinterest Launches "Find Your Routes"

As we continue to celebrate black history month here on cheddar news. We're diving into the rise of black travel and the challenges that persist. The social media giant Pinterest launching a new travel hub called find your roots to inspire safe travel and highlight black travelers. So I want to bring in cheddar news, senior reporter Michele Castelli a with more Michelle. It's good to see you. Why did Pinterest decide to focus on black travel for black history month paul kristen traveling is something that I love doing and I've personally been to 36 countries and counting and I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to see the world and as things open up, we're noticing that more people are looking to jump on that plane or get on that car. We're hearing it across earnings, Pinterest itself has seen a boom in interest in black travel in particular. So take searches for black couple travel aesthetics, That's up 130% year over year. But many people of color still face issues of prejudice when they vacation. I actually spoke to Pinterest chief content officer Malik do card and he talks about how he still faces it when he travels. He told me about one incident that still sticks with him. So take a listen, we were at brunch and my kids were a little younger than my kids today. You know, we're all sort of in that, you know teenager, um, sort of bracket and uh, one of my kids just noticed that we, we were like, you know, sort of sticking out and being looked at a bit and I guess I had noticed it, but like, you know, didn't really pay much mind to it. Uh and my my son called it out and said, you know dad, like why, why why why are people looking at us? So most people probably don't think about issues like this, including having people openly staring at your family for simply eating brunch in a foreign country. But for black travelers, this is a daily occurrence and it oftentimes can threaten their safety. So Pinterest decided to create founder of find your routes in order to celebrate and encourage black travel, but also to bring awareness of the history of this issue that still exist today. So the idea to do this originated from an internal group of black employees at Pinterest who also loved travel, but felt that this was an important topic to highlight. I totally get it Michelle, how does this campaign work on Pinterest? So it's pretty cool. This hub has a lot of cool partners from Smithsonian curator, candace e tailer, publisher travel in war and there's others. So do Card explained a little bit more in fact, on Pinterest. If you just look at um search as an indicator. Um we've seen uh search the search term black girl travel aesthetic grow 80% year on year from the last year and we also see organization, um experts curate urz offering up black travel experiences for for travels that in some ways, in many ways I would say actually tap into the history of what made the Green Book so important. So you might have heard do card reference something called the Green Book and the idea of bringing it to the digital age. So if you're not familiar, the Green Book was a guide that was published in 1936 to 1967 and it was really meant to help black people travel safely, especially during the jim Crow era. So car travel was increasing at this time and many people started to go on road trips, but not all businesses accepted black travelers. So this guide initially was just for locations in new york city that would accept black. But it also expanded to include other businesses in the US and Canada and europe and africa and more. There was also a movie that was released about the guide in 2018, which won the Academy award for best picture. So Pinterest is looking at find your routes as a modern version of that. So if you look at the candidacy taylor Pinterest page, it actually focuses on the history of black travel in the US and other influencers have created tips for things like solo travel in cartagena Colombia and to try out in brazil where black people can feel comfortable, but it's also trying to find a positive way to celebrate black travel. So some other cool, unique experiences that they highlight include the first black dude ranch in Bell Mountain California. There's also an all black dance troupe in Madrid, so there's plenty for everyone to check out, both to educate themselves about the issue as well as to find new things that you might want to do on a trip. Very cool cheddar News Senior Reporter Michelle Castilian Michelle. Thank you for that report.