How PinXMap works

Start here

Just open it. There is no sign-in wall. The map, the search and the whole planner are there the moment pinxmap.com loads. You can plan a trip, save places and set where you are staying without an account.

What you lose without one is everywhere else: nothing is kept beyond this browser, and nobody else can see it. An account is what saves the trip and what lets you share it.

Your traveller profile

Account → Your traveller profile holds your name, phone, home address and the things that change a suggestion — dietary needs, how far you like to walk, the kind of place you stay, your budget, who you travel with.

Signing in

Sign in and Create account sit together in the top right, and open a small panel over the app. Close it with the ×, the Esc key, or Keep looking around — the trip behind it is untouched.

The same panel does all four jobs:

• Sign in — email and password.
• Create an account — the link under the sign-in form.
• Forgot your password? — emails you a link to set a new one.
• Choose a new password — where that link lands you. This is the one view that cannot be dismissed, because a half-finished reset leaves you with no working password at all.

To change a password you already know: Account → Change password.

The four tabs

Everything lives in one of four places, and they answer different questions.

The map is always under the Explore tab, and the Concierge opens over it rather than replacing it.

Finding places

Two boxes on the Explore tab, and either works on its own.

Where to?

Moves the map. A city, a park, a neighbourhood, a landmark — anything that exists on a map. Leave it alone and the search runs wherever the map is already pointed.

Suggestions appear as you type, about a third of a second after you stop. Anything on the map qualifies, not just cities: yosemite offers the national park, heathrow the airport. Each suggestion shows what kind of thing it is and where, so the four Springfields are told apart at a glance. Arrow keys and Enter work; Esc dismisses.

Go does something different and still useful: it reads the whole phrase, so you can describe a place instead of naming it. Use the list for “I know what it is called”, Go for anything looser.

What are you looking for?

Finds places and drops them as circular pins. Type it however you would say it out loud:

• hotels
• museums and restaurants
• sushi that isn’t a chain
• parks and historic sites

Ask for several kinds at once and each becomes its own coloured layer. The Suggestions chips are shortcuts, and tapping more than one builds a combined search.

Under the map, “N places found” expands into the full list. Click a row to fly to its pin; click a pin to highlight its row. Each layer gets a chip: click the label to hide that layer, the × to discard it. Neither touches anything you have saved.

Pins

Point at any pin and its details appear — no click needed. Click instead and it stays put, which is how you reach the buttons inside: Set as stay, + Add to map, + Add to top picks. On a phone there is no hover, so tapping does the same job.

The search follows the map. Once you have searched for something, dragging or zooming the map searches the new area after a moment — you do not have to press Search again. It re-runs the same search, so it costs no AI action. Zoom out far enough and it stops and says Zoom in to search this area, because past about 25km across the circle no longer covers what you are looking at. On Basic and Pro, a saved pin whose links are unknown offers Find social links. It reads OpenStreetMap's own contact tags first, then the place's website — the “follow us” link in its footer. Nothing is guessed. We do not ask an AI for a handle, because a confident wrong Instagram link is an endorsement of a stranger's account from inside your trip. Often there is nothing to find, and it says so. A saved pin's popup also has Remove from trip, which takes the place off the map entirely. It asks twice — the first tap arms it, the second does it — because it sits right under the button above it.

Pin shapes mean something, and are not just decoration:

• Circle — found by a search, not yet part of the trip.
• Teardrop — saved to the trip.
• Square badge — a booking: an airport, a station, a venue.
• Large gold, ringed — where you are staying.

What you’ve saved

+ Add to map — on any result row, or in any found pin’s popup — is the moment a place becomes part of the trip. It changes from a circular pin to a teardrop, appears in Locations, and everyone on the trip sees it.

Places you already have show ✓ On map when they turn up in a later search, so the same place cannot be added twice.

Straight onto a day

+ Add to itinerary sits under + Add to map on every result and in every popup. Pick a day, optionally a time, and the place is saved to the map, marked as one of your picks, and placed on that day — one button instead of a trip through three tabs.

The two buttons ask different questions, so neither replaces the other: + Add to map means “this is part of the trip”, + Add to itinerary means “this is happening on Wednesday”. Scheduling a place that is already saved will not add a duplicate.

Selecting several at once

Every row has a checkbox, with one in the header that ticks the lot. Tick some and a bar appears with Add to top picks, Remove from top picks and Clear selection. The count only ever promises what the buttons will actually do — change a filter and any ticked rows that disappeared drop out of the selection.

Removing a place

The × at the end of a row in Locations, or on the place’s chip in the Explore legend. Both remove it from the trip for everyone.

Where you’re staying

Anything lodging-shaped — hotel, hostel, Airbnb, Vrbo, B&B, guesthouse, resort, apartment — gets a Set as stay button instead of “+ Add”.

Setting one does three things:

1. Its pin becomes large, gold and ringed, so you can find it instantly.
2. It jumps to the first row of Locations.
3. Every distance in the app is measured from it.

Only one place can be your stay; setting a new one clears the old. Until you set one, the Distance column shows “—”, because there is nothing to measure from. Removing the place clears the stay with it.

A hotel entered under Bookings does this automatically: it looks the address up and sets it as your stay.

Shortlisting together

Three buttons above the Locations table switch what you are looking at:

• All locations — everything saved to the trip.
• Top picks — what the group has shortlisted.
• My picks — just yours.

+ Add on any non-lodging row puts it in the shortlist; Remove takes it off. It is also in each pin’s popup as + Add to top picks.

Picks are shared and live — one made on someone else’s phone shows up on yours without a refresh. The User column shows who added each one, and several people can pick the same place.

Your stay stays visible in every view, at the top. It is not a pick; it is the origin every distance is measured from, and the numbers do not mean much without it in sight.

The day plan

One section per day between the trip’s start and end dates. Every saved place carries a dropdown: pick a day and it moves there, pick Not scheduled and it returns to the list at the bottom. Nothing is lost either way — the place stays on the map and in Locations regardless.

Four ways to look at it

Buttons at the top right of the tab. The choice is remembered on this device.

• Grid — days side by side, places down each one. The whole trip at a glance, and the best view for deciding what still needs filling.
• List — days stacked, places spread across each row. Better when one day has a lot in it.
• Agenda — everything in time order, one stream, with empty days left out. The “what’s next” view, for the trip itself rather than the planning.
• Map — one day’s stops drawn in order, numbered and joined by a line. The view that answers “does this day cross the city four times?”

Grid, List and Agenda all edit the same plan; Map is for looking.

The Map view

Each stop is a numbered teardrop in the day’s planned order, and pointing at one tells you which place it is, with the same popup and buttons you get on Explore. Where you are staying shows as its gold pin, because it is where the day starts and ends.

One day is the default — the arrows either side of the date move between days. On a single day you also get the day’s bookings: an airport, a station or a hotel appears with the same badge it has everywhere else, rather than joining the numbered run, because the numbers are the order you can change and a flight is fixed by its clock.

All days puts the whole trip on one map, each day in its own colour, with a chip per day underneath — tap one to drop back to that day on its own. This is the view that answers “should Tuesday and Thursday be the same day?”, since two days in the same part of town are obvious the moment you see them together. Colour means the day here and not the category, which is the one place in the app where that is true, and the chips say so.

The line between stops is straight, and the distance under the date is an estimate using the same allowance for real streets as the Distance column in Locations. It is not a driving route and nothing here is navigation — it is there to show the order and the shape of a day.

One honest gap: a booking only appears if its address was found when you entered it. If it never geocoded there is no pin to show, and the map says how many are missing rather than leaving you to notice.

Times are optional

Give a place a time and it sorts into position by the clock. Leave it blank and it keeps its place in the manual order underneath the timed ones. Half a plan is usually an order rather than a schedule — the market, then lunch, then the gallery — and that still works.

Reordering

Untimed places can be moved two ways, and both do the same thing:

• Drag the handle (the dotted grip at the start of the row) and drop the place where you want it. Best when moving something a long way.
• The ↑ and ↓ buttons move it one position at a time. These work from the keyboard.

A row with a time has neither, because its position is already decided by the clock — and a dragged place can never land above a timed one for the same reason.

What else turns up here

Flights and trains place themselves. Anything with a date in Bookings appears on its own day, with its time, without being scheduled — so a day that starts with an 07:55 departure says so at the top. They are read-only here; edit them in their own tab.

The × takes a place off its day and drops it back into Not scheduled. It never deletes anything.

Scheduling is something the whole group does: anyone who can edit the trip can move a place to a day. Removing a place is still limited to whoever added it.

Bookings

+ Add travel covers flights, trains, buses, ferries, car hire and where you are staying. The form changes to match, so a hire car is not asked for a flight number. + Add event covers a show, a concert, a match, a museum entry or a tour — anything with a ticket.

The two buttons offer different lists, so you cannot put a ferry in an event or a concert in a flight. Other is on both, for the thing that is neither.

Each journey has one or more legs: where from, where to, and the date and time at each end. Times are whatever your ticket says, in local time at each end — the same numbers you will be checking on the day.

Everything here lands on the map

A flight leaves its two airports, a train its two stations, a hire car its pick-up, a hotel the property itself. They are the fixed points of the trip, so they are drawn as badges rather than the teardrops used for places you might go — an airport should be a different shape, not just a different colour, on a map with forty pins on it. Repeated endpoints are only pinned once, so a return flight does not leave two copies of each airport.

Names from a real confirmation email work best. Anything that cannot be found is skipped — the booking still saves.

Paste the email instead

+ Add travel or events with AI reads any of it. One button, not one per kind: paste a flight confirmation, a hotel booking, a theatre ticket or a timed museum entry and it works out which it is, then fills in the service number, the traveller, and every leg with its dates and times.

It fills the form; it does not save. You see what was read, fix anything wrong, and press Save yourself. This is a paid feature.

Changing one afterwards

Edit on any booking card, and on any booking row in the Itinerary — a wrong time is usually noticed while looking at the day, not while looking at the booking. You can change what you entered, plus anything on a trip you created.

Changing a time or a name saves immediately. Changing where a leg starts or ends looks the addresses up again and re-pins them, which takes a few seconds; pins from the old addresses stay on the map, so remove them from Locations if you do not want them.

Your account and trips

The dates are one picker, not two. Click either From or To and a two-month calendar opens. Click the first day, then the last, and both fields fill in at once. Clicking an earlier day than the one you started on restarts the range, which is usually what you meant. The arrows move through months, Clear starts over, and Done, Esc or a click elsewhere closes it.

The trip name sits in the middle of the header — click it and type. On a phone the two date fields collapse into a single button showing the range; tapping it opens the same calendar.

Multiple trips. Switch trip moves between them or creates a new one. Each has its own places, picks, bookings and dates.

Planning with other people

Invite, inside a trip, copies a link and tells you how many editing seats you have left. Anyone who opens it and signs in joins the trip and can read all of it. Share on the “Your trips” screen does the same without opening the trip first.

Someone who opens the link without an account is told the trip was shared with them and asked to sign in or create one. There is no way to show them a shared trip otherwise: a trip is readable only by its members, which is the same rule that keeps everyone else’s trips out of yours.

Who can change what

Your own trips are always fully yours, on any plan: add, edit, remove, rename, re-date, share, delete.

On a trip someone else created, editing is unlocked by the creator’s plan, for a limited number of the people they invite:

So you do not need to buy anything to help plan a friend’s trip. Seats go in join order, oldest first, and a fifth person joining a three-seat trip never pushes anyone already there back out — they join as a reader. Your own plan always works too: if you are on Basic or Pro you can edit any trip you are invited to, seats or no seats.

If you are on the free plan you will see a line at the top of a shared trip saying you are viewing it, and the buttons that would change it are simply not there — rather than there and broken.

Deleting a trip

Delete asks once more, naming the trip, then removes it for everyone: its places, bookings, top picks and everybody’s access. There is no undo and no bin to recover it from. Only the person who created a trip sees Delete on it; if you were invited to someone else’s, you leave rather than delete.

Before a plan runs out

If your plan has an end date, the app warns you for the last two weeks — and tells you who else it affects, not just you: “Basic ends in 5 days. When it does, 3 people on your trip drop to read-only.” You can dismiss it, and it comes back once a day, because the consequence lands on other people.

Two things a lapse never does: it never touches trips you created — those stay fully yours on any plan — and it never tells your collaborators anything about your billing. They simply find the trip read-only.

The Concierge

The tab on the right edge of the map. Click it and the panel slides out; click it again and it closes. It is a chat that can see the trip in front of you — your dates, where you are staying, and every place you have saved. That is the difference between “what should I do in Boston” and advice built around your hotel and your shortlist.

It opens over the map rather than replacing it, so you can keep looking at what you are asking about. Esc closes it, as does clicking outside.

Its suggestions go on the map as it answers

When it recommends specific places, they are looked up and dropped onto the map behind the panel straight away, as the same circular found pins a search produces. Nothing is saved yet — they are proposals you can see the shape of before deciding.

To keep one, use the row of Pin buttons under the reply, or close the panel and pin from the place’s own popup. Either turns it into a proper trip pin. A place you already have shows a ✓ rather than being offered twice.

Once you have added travel, the Concierge knows when you land and when you leave, and stops suggesting things for an evening you are still in the air. It is never told your booking reference.

Each conversation is kept in this browser, per trip, so you can come back to it. It is not synced between devices.

This is a paid feature. Free and guest accounts can open it and see what it does, but not chat.

Plans

Annual works out at about ten months on either plan.

Until now Basic and Pro differed only in how much — more AI actions, more people. Forwarding a booking by email is the first thing Pro can do that Basic cannot.

What counts as an AI action

One Concierge message, or one confirmation email read — whether you pasted it or forwarded it. They share the same pool and it resets on the 1st. A forwarded email spends from the allowance of whoever created the trip, since it is their plan that turns the feature on for everyone.

Searching never counts. Neither does saving places, shortlisting, or typing a booking in by hand. The phrase understanding behind the search boxes is free for everyone, guests included.

What the free plan includes

Everything except the Concierge, reading confirmation emails, and carrying other people on trips you create. That means unlimited trips of your own, unlimited places, the full map and search, the day plan, bookings entered by hand, and offline access. Trips you create are always fully yours to edit.

Installing it, and using it offline

Once you have saved a few places — or come back a second time — a strip offers to add PinXMap to your home screen or Dock. It then opens in its own window with no address bar.

On an iPhone or iPad there is no Install button to offer, because Safari has none; the strip tells you the two taps instead (Share, then Add to Home Screen). Dismiss it once and it stays gone.

What works with no signal

Offline, PinXMap is a viewer and editor, not a finder.

Plan on the ground; read on the plane.

Limits worth knowing

Where the place data comes from

Search results come from OpenStreetMap, which is volunteer-maintained. It is excellent on parks, monuments and stations that commercial sources skip, but a place that quietly closed without anyone updating the map can still appear. Listed opening hours and a recent survey date are the best available freshness signals, and neither is a guarantee.

If the search stops working, use the Concierge

The place search runs on Overpass, a free, shared, volunteer-funded service that is sometimes overloaded and occasionally down altogether. When it is, What are you looking for? fails and says so — it retries twice first, so a busy minute usually recovers on its own.

Everything else keeps working, because nothing else depends on it: the map, your saved places, the itinerary, bookings, sharing, and the Where to? box, which uses a different service and will still move the map to a city.

The Concierge keeps working too, and it is the way round. Ask it for seafood restaurants in the city you are in and it will name them and offer to pin them to your map — the same result by a different route. Two honest differences: it spends an AI action per message, and it is recalling places rather than reading a live map, so it can miss somewhere that opened recently or name somewhere that has closed. The search is authoritative; the Concierge is knowledgeable.

A search shows the nearest matches, not all of them

A big city has thousands of restaurants and no map can show them all, so results are capped at the closest few hundred to wherever you are centred. When there were more, the count line says so. Two ways to reach the rest: be more specific (korean restaurants rather than restaurants), or search the place by name in Where to?, which finds it directly however obscure it is.

There are no star ratings

Nothing in the app is a rating, by design. “Best” or “top rated” in a search is approximated from how well-documented a place is — not from reviews.

The “Keyword search” banner

Not an error. The map and every place are still live data; only the phrase understanding falls back from AI to keyword matching, which happens when that service is briefly unavailable or busy. Searching keeps working.

Getting help

Email support@pinxmap.com. If something is broken, the most useful things to include are what you were doing, what you expected, and roughly when it happened.

See also Privacy — what is stored, who it is shared with and how to have it deleted — and Terms.