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Visit California is committed to providing travelers with the most enriching and seamless planning experience possible. By leveraging cutting-edge technology on our Road Trips Hub, we empower visitors to effortlessly tap into the full depth and breadth of California's travel inspiration to plan their own epic journey. This initiative marks a significant step forward in our ability to connect travelers with the personalized information they need to plan unforgettable California adventures, directly from our industry's vast library of content.
Caroline Beteta
President & CEO of Visit California
The Opportunity
For its 2025 Road Trips campaign, Visit California set out to give travelers a more personalized, seamless way to plan their journeys.
The mission: Make it effortless for visitors to tap into Visit California's vast library of local, expert-curated content — including 74+ curated road trip itineraries — and turn travel inspiration into their own unforgettable adventures.
Key priorities:
- Engagement and Retention — Let travelers ask anything, get instant answers and build personalized itineraries as they explore.
- Partner Referrals — Surface contextually relevant suggestions that connect travelers with local businesses.
- Data Insights — Capture real-time chat insights to guide future content and campaign strategy.
The Strategy
The seamless integration is easy for travelers to use and prominently featured to drive awareness and engagement:
- A persistent sidebar
- A featured spot on the homepage
- Calls-to-action built right into each itinerary
Beyond the core Mindtrip capabilities, the partnership includes:
🛣️ Customizable Itineraries — Visitors can personalize any of Visit California’s 74+ curated road trip itineraries or start from scratch with a few must-see stops.
🧭 Enhanced Routing — Multi-stop planning with optimized mapping make it easier to enjoy the journey and get to the destination efficiently.
📍Real-time local information — The AI indexes live data from local businesses, so visitors get timely updates, like knowing that less than 2% of Los Angeles was affected during the 2025 wildfires.
🌎 Multi-Language Accessibility — Built-in translation allows for planning in nine different languages.
🎥 Inspiration-to-Action — Visitors can turn Visit California’s social posts, videos and guides into personalized plans — instantly.
The Impact
Behind the numbers is a new kind of planning experience.
In testing: Travelers consistently described AI trip planning as efficient, time-saving and helpful for sparking ideas or curating options.
In practice: Nearly half of AI users started a chat, with an average of two to three exchanges per session.
As of July, 2025 more site visitors were choosing the Mindtrip AI experience over both curated road trips and the travel quiz options.
The outcome: More time on site, deeper engagement and a stronger connection between travelers and Visit California.
Ready to elevate your destination?
Contact us to talk about how Mindtrip for Business can help you build smarter, more engaging trip planning experiences.
