Summer 2026 updates

Welcome to the Pienten Suomi blog

On the Pienten Suomi blog we write about domestic travel, destination tips, and other stories from the Pienten Suomi team. In this first blog post, we'll share a bit about what's happened with the site's development over the summer.

If Pienten Suomi isn't familiar to you yet, we recommend checking out Pienten Suomi's story, where we explain a bit about the background — why the site was founded and who it's designed for.

Destination tips from fellow travelers, checked by the admin team

More and more sites rely entirely on AI or APIs to list as many destinations as possible. Pienten Suomi's idea is the opposite: readers themselves suggest destinations and explain why they suit the target audience, i.e. families with children traveling within Finland. Suggesting destinations has been made significantly easier over the summer.

The summer's most significant improvements

More improvements to the "Add a destination tip" form

• The destination tip form can now use your own location, with municipality and region data filled in automatically based on your location. This means you don't have to look up the exact address separately — you can send in a tip right on the spot.
• The website address field is now also optional, since searching for a website while out and about can be unnecessarily difficult, especially on a mobile device. The admin team will check and, if needed, add the destination's website address before publishing regardless.

Destination card improvements

• Destinations can now be browsed either from the map or from a list.
• Destinations more often now have a small image, either submitted with the tip or fetched from the destination's website (if an OG Image meta tag is available).
• The destination card dynamically lists the four nearest destinations based on distance.
• Destinations can now also be liked, i.e. marked with a star. Like counts are shown publicly, signaling to others that a destination is popular.
• The "Directions" button opens Google Maps directions straight to the destination.
• You can also report an error on a destination card, for example if the destination is closed.

New map style

• We designed a somewhat clearer map style to replace the generic base map.

Data model improvements

• Municipality and region data have been structured into filterable data fields. You can now narrow down results based on this information. This geographic data was retrieved from the National Land Survey of Finland's API service.

New blog platform

• We built our own blog platform so we could easily write things like our travel stories here. You're reading the very first blog post written on this platform! 🥹
• The blog platform supports multiple languages and will initially be translated into English.
• It's also possible to embed destinations from the map directly to an article, as in the example below 👇

Lots of usability improvements, such as:

• The map destination's behavior, especially on mobile devices, has been significantly improved. For example, closing a card is now more natural and behaves in an app-like way.
• Lots of caching improvements so the app runs faster on mobile. Did you know you can use Pienten Suomi as a mobile app?

Thank you for using Pienten Suomi!

Pienten Suomi is developed for its users. It's been a joy watching the site grow and seeing tips shared from all around the country! It's because of you that we keep working to make the site even better. Thank you for all the tips and reports so far! ❤️

Have a wonderful summer, everyone!