Travel Trends with Dan Christian
#1 B2B Travel Podcast. If you are looking to stay ahead in the travel industry, this new podcast hits all the highlights! The Travel Trends Podcast is where industry leaders converge to share & shape the future. Whether you're an emerging entrepreneur, a seasoned industry executive, or a dedicated travel professional, you’ll be able to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Uncover valuable insights, innovative strategies, and meaningful connections that will elevate your travel business or career to new heights.
Travel Trends with Dan Christian
The Impact of AI on Destination Marketing featuring Visit California
In this second episode - part of a 3-part mini-series with Mindtrip exploring how AI is transforming destination marketing - we sit down with Lynn Carpenter, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Visit California, to unpack how a how a $157.3B tourism economy is being reimagined through AI, data, and human storytelling. Lynn shares why engagement now matters more than traffic, taking us from the dot-com era to today’s AI surge and revealing how her team built an advanced content platform designed for both humans and machines. Think California industry led RAG architecture, a massive digital content library, and editorial processes that add what the web can’t know yet: local nuance, future packages, and timely insights.
The results are eye-opening. Visit California’s new road trip hub offered three planning paths - quiz, human-curated, and AI-assisted - and the AI option has now surpassed curated links in click-throughs. Visitors entering via AI spend an average of nine minutes on site, a strong signal of intent for a property designed to hand off to California travel partners for booking. Lynn breaks down how international offices inform market strategy, how multilingual search became a hidden growth lever, and how her team draws a direct line from owned content to more than a billion dollars in incremental tourism impact. For more information, please visit industry.visitcalifornia.com.
Join us next week for the final episode in this mini-series, featuring Discover Puerto Rico CMO Storm Tussey and Mindtrip CMO Michelle Denogean, as we explore what’s next for destination marketing in the age of AI.
The #1 B2B Travel Podcast Globally. Over 100 Episodes. Listeners in 125 countries. New Episodes Every Weds.
https://www.traveltrendspodcast.com/
I think that you can create all the great messages you want that resonate and that are brilliant strategy. But if you cannot connect them to the right people at the right time, then they're falling on deaf ears.
SPEAKER_00:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Travel Trends. This is your host, Dan Christian, and we're about to begin part two of our special three-part series on how AI is impacting destination marketing, which is brought to us in partnership with our friends over at Mindtrip, who believe travel is at its best when your local expertise meets the power of AI. Our first episode last week featured Jeanette Roush, the chief AI officer at Brand USA. And the response as expected was incredible. She is certainly one of the sharpest minds in this space. And we have two more amazing speakers lined up for you. Next week, we'll wrap up the series with Storm Tussie, the CMO for Discover Puerto Rico. And in today's episode, we're headed to California to speak to Lynn Carpenter, the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Visit California. Now, California holds a very special place in my heart because I spent two years living and exploring there. So I was really excited to sit down and have this conversation with Lynn to understand exactly how Visit California works, their mandate, their objectives, and how they market one of the most beautiful places in the world. And ultimately how they define success in an industry that is evolving so rapidly. She was such an ideal person to speak to because Lynn truly gets this space. Her career spans back to the dot-com era, like myself, but in California, really where it all started. And she has firsthand experience with these major technological shifts. So she's not only able to be able to speak from that experience, but she has a unique connection with Mind Trip because she was very early into working with their team, as you'll hear in our conversation today, because they are based right there in California. So let's jump right in and bring Lynn into the conversation to talk about how the world of destination marketing organizations are having to rapidly evolve in the realm of AI. Welcome, Lynn. It's so great to have you with us. Thanks so much for joining us on our special series.
SPEAKER_01:Great to be here. I'm so excited about this conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Me too, because I love California. I was so excited for you to be a part of this series that we've been doing with Mind Trip on how DMOs or tourism boards are being impacted by AI. And someone like yourself, having just heard that introduction, most of our listeners understanding that you've been at Visit California for 20 years, you've got such a deep understanding of this industry, and you happen to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this because I know you have a technology background, but what brought you into tourism and ultimately working at a DMO like Visit California?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I have been so lucky in my career and the people I've met. It has been an incredible journey. And it was, it's been fun to reflect on that. I think it's going to sound like I'm marketing California right now because I'm born and raised in the East Coast. Um, my father was an engineer, my mother was an HR professional. It kind of set me up perfectly for sort of that left-right brain marriage uh that is re that is marketing and that is technology marketing in particular. I um I actually graduated uh from college, and my first job was in uh the first startup in Silicon Valley called Go. And um, and I was able to meet a lot of people from Claris and from Apple and those executives, and I was young and I didn't even know I was in technology. I thought I was changing the world by communicating, I was in comps, about pen-based computing architecture and how we would never have to use keyboards again. And I became like an advocate for this idea of the interface between humans and technology. And what's weird is it hasn't changed. Like those topics are threaded through my entire career. It's like social cultural anthropology. But I went uh from there to um a company called Netscape and got to participate in the 90s uh at the birth of the internet, and that was a front row seat and incredible. Um, and I again, if you had tried to plan it, it wouldn't have happened. So these things just happen. Um, and it was an incredible uh opportunity to be around world-class people thinking about problems that hadn't been solved yet.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's really interesting, and this is where as we're having a conversation about destination marketing and 2026 and the use of AI, it's really interesting to get your background given that it is technology. And actually, when you mentioned that, uh Go go and go to.com was one of the, you know, it was the search engine that most people have forgotten about. But it actually it it I remember when it first launched because it was, you know, they had the business model of being able to buy keywords and and have a cost per click model. And I was like, this is amazing. That was like, you know, obviously Google embraced that and and the rest is history, but uh but those were those early exciting days. And I feel like we're in a similar stage with with AI. And uh I'm sure you feel like, especially being in California, is there a similar vibe, do you think, to what's happening today with AI and travel? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I would I would have described the uh late 90s as kind of a gold rock rush era in Silicon Valley. Um, and I'm not I I was in this for people, and I was in this for um changing the world. Like it was about sort of the social evolution that stems from technology. Um, but it was amazing to see it come to life, and it was an honor to be there for it. And what's interesting now is here we are so much later. I don't want to scare anyone, and I'm not comparing these things, but history does repeat itself. Um, and there are so many lessons from those early days that I see, you know, the hype cycle, the pundits. And so it's not so surprising to me. I'm not really looking in a crystal ball, I'm kind of looking in my resume to say, oh, this is gonna happen next. Yeah. Uh and that's been helpful.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong. And I and what I mean by that is anytime something new comes on uh the scene, it's human nature to um have it divide people into this is good, this is bad. Um and so one of the things that I think is really important, and one of the things that we've done with our team is to say there is no good or bad in new technology, there's only curiosity.
SPEAKER_00:That's a good way to put it, yeah. Right? Yeah. Well, speaking of that curiosity, you made your transition between tech and travel. I know you worked at Mammoth Mountain for a few years, and then you've been leading the way with uh Visit California as the VP of marketing uh for nearly 20 years now. So tell us how you actually made that leap into travel. Was it and clearly you went west, you went from east to west, you went to you know for uh college in San Francisco. So you you know you made a commitment to the West Coast. Um was it that was it the love of adventure and um and travel that made you want to jump into the industry? What what brought about that transition?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's the right, that's the right question, and it's a long story, but I'll say this. I I found California. It's gonna sound like I'm marketing California, Dan, and I'm not, but I am a real, I am a real life case study in that the opportunities were endless here uh for a person in business and particularly somebody that wanted to learn new things and be on the forefront of what was happening. Um and so it's a place where many things can happen. I will also say it's a place where an outdoor adventurist and a skier can really have a great time. And one of the things I did after Silicon Valley is I I actually said, hmm, I want to try something new. I had a mentor once that said to me, I uh I always ask my bosses, what what advice do you have for me? What should I do? And I think I was about 20. And she said, always change jobs every 10 years. It keeps you so fresh. And I remember thinking that she had been like a furniture maker, and then she was head of engineering, and I I was her admin assistant. And I I thought, oh, I I I wonder what that means. That seems like it would be really hard to do. And and I think I understand it now. It's about tilling the soil and making sure that you know exactly what's underneath and that you're staying fresh and that you're staying curious and open to what's out there. Um and so California provides that because everybody's always inventing something here.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. And I remember when I first moved to California, everyone was telling me it's you know, that's the place that you can snowboard and surf on the same day or ski and surf depending on your preference. Mine is snowboarding, and I was so keen to do that. I've snowboarded at Mammoth, and um, but I didn't get to do surfing on the same day. And uh, but nevertheless, it's it it highlights everything that California has to offer. So that's why I say you're you know you're blessed in many ways to have such an incredible region of the world to be able to promote because it has so much to offer. But tell tell us a little bit about Visit California, the organization, and your role there, Lynn.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, so I'm head of marketing for Visit California, and that's meant many things in the last 20 years. When we first started, um, we're very focused and still are on California's brand, our brand health, and doing one of our guiding principles is doing what the industry can't do for itself. Um, and I have to be honest, coming out of private enterprise and working for a DMO, I had an incredible opportunity uh to learn. And um and to learn about what the role a DMO plays, but also to bring some of the ethos and uh planning focus that I had learned in the Silicon Valley to travel marketing. And so it was an incredible ride for me and learning curve, going from the ski industry to um to travel, because what we were able to do is first and foremost, and I had no idea. I guess I should back up and say, when I was at Mammoth, I got to sit on a committee that was run by Carolyn Batetta, our CEO at Visa California. And she's uh a magnificent visionary for California in the travel industry. And I was sitting in the room trying to understand how my selling tickets and my budget attached to these big brand initiatives. And I was listening to her, and because coming out of technology, you don't have big budgets to do giant marketing programs. You're like scrappy influencer marketing or earned media marketing. And so I had learned a lot of that and digital marketing. But to sit there and listen to her talk about big brand marketing, I became totally enamored with this idea that that style of messaging and big brands and look and really embodying a brand and developing a brand with media dollars was an incredible opportunity if you can combine it with the digital acumen that was emerging at that time uh in both uh the web and social media. You know, you said like what's what's been happening. And so if I had to think about this, I think about it in terms of like this evolution where we started um in doing brand marketing. When I started, our entire budget was a media budget for television advertising. And Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor of California. And he had offered, I think I can say this, he had offered his talent uh to help support California, like the ultimate influencer, right? Uh he had been skiing up in uh another state, and some of the people from the ski industry had come forward and said, Hey, you should ski in California. And so that's how I got involved as we started to work on advertising that was specific to uh him, his talent. Um, and then and then as I joined the organization and sat in Sacramento, the capital of California, and looked at California, it became very clear to me that there was so much opportunity to support all of California from this central point of creating a brand and enabling tools that help the entire state flourish. Um, and so that's that's what we've been doing really in different ways, touching consumers and working with our industry partners. So if you think about it, Visit California has a mission um to create desire for the California experience. That's a pretty lofty mission, especially for the fourth largest economy in the world, right? You know, you're not gonna have to create awareness for it, but but creating desire for that experience is a is a complex process because it we are so large.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. No, you mentioned a number of interesting things there, of course. We have to give uh full credit to Arnie, the governator, and what he and I think when you just think about remarkable life stories, because he certainly is also one of those people like that. I don't I don't think he's overly divisive politically, but I mean when you look at what he's accomplished in his life, um, from rising up in Austria, moving to the US, becoming the governor, but it's like he's an incredible marketer, a very uh savvy businessman, and so uh and obviously a great advocate for the state. And so uh uh you know you are certainly blessed with uh the celebrities that obviously can promote California, but uh tell us a little bit about the your role as a marketer for the state of California or for the for Visit California. Um what does your marketing look like when you plan out for 2026 your campaigns and like yeah, tell us a little bit about the way that your tourism board functions.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's interesting because I think there are all tourism boards are not created equally. I think it makes that this a very interesting time to be working in partnership. And a lot of it is based on our business model, and this is one of the things that um makes our industry so interesting. But Visit California's business model is that we support the entire industry. We have a number of different destination marketing organizations and stakeholders that are part of what we call our tourism ecosystem. And so when my team, whether we're in a paid, owned trade channels, social media, we are always thinking about how do we create economic prosperity for California? How do we drive incremental visitation? And how do we measure that incremental success with a straight line to our program? And so we do that in a variety of different ways, but principally our strategies lie in a focus on consumers. And so I think maybe that was one of the first observations we made, and one of the, I think, brilliant things that that our organization and our stakeholders did was to free us up to say, go do pure marketing that drives the economy and protected our funding from that, so that we are a private-public partnership, but the majority of our funding comes from our stakeholders. And those stakeholders and our board is focused on making sure that we serve consumers and serve the industry as a result. So the more we grow visitation, we benefit from it. And so that's what we've been doing for the last 20 years.
SPEAKER_00:That's great. And when it comes to inbound, like so there's obviously international travelers into the United States headed to California. There are Americans that are very keen to see California or come back to California. And then of course you've got uh Californians that are very keen to see their own backyard. When it comes to how Visit California speaks to all three of those, do you have certain kind of mandates or priorities? And and do you've actually genuinely keen to know this when especially having lived there, because there is so much to see and do throughout the state of California, uh, how do you market to people within the state, or is that part of your your remit?
SPEAKER_01:It is not. So the the goal for Visit California is to grow our tourism economy. And that does not mean uh marketing in-state or uh let's just say, think of it as recirculating traffic uh from one destination to the other. I I think that um there are many destinations within California that have the dollars and the focus to take a look at in-state uh traffic. However, that being said, there are a couple of times that our board has overridden that statute in our mandate. And uh those times were at 9-11 and actually just this last year with the terrible fires in Los Angeles. And so um we also in during during COVID did and in-state marketing specifically to create desire for California with a 40 million population base. Uh it is uh uh an opportunity for us, for sure, to increase businesses and to support the tourism industry, but it is not a focus. So maybe sometimes we may buy national media and it will be seen by in-state. Certainly our digital programs are seen by in-state, but from a targeting perspective, our focus is growing the tourism economy.
SPEAKER_00:Really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that because I think that'll be interesting for our listeners as well to know and understand. So when we're thinking about inbound travelers, then obviously you do have international, which is a clear priority to bring people into the country and to the destination. Um, but how does that balance then with Americans looking to travel to California if it's all inbound? How do you balance those two? And if you wouldn't mind, too. I mean, sharing some of the stats. I always find uh stats interesting. The ones that'll share with our listeners that are in Canada that always amaze me, Lynn, is that you know, our national pastime is known as hockey, ice hockey as it gets called, other places, so we just call it hockey. But in California, there's actually more there's obviously the population of California is larger than the population of Canada, so there's there's one thing. Um you mentioned it's the fourth largest economy, which I think people uh many people still don't realize just the scale of uh industry in in California. But uh to highlight the point about industry and population size, there's actually more people that play inline uh hockey, like so that they rollerblading as it was called, or inline skating. Uh there's more Californians that actually play that sport than Canadians across our country playing ice hockey. And I'm like, man, we we we can't even dominate that. It's like uh so but it was amazing, even living in California. There's like a lot of people that actually do play ice ice hockey. It has gotten more important anyway.
SPEAKER_01:But tell Well, uh here's a fun, here's a fun personal fact. My son went to ice hockey school.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:I'm glad he's a Californian, and I don't even exactly know how that happened, but I will tell you San San Jose has a wonderful arena, and they have a shark arena, and we we went down to watch the sharks one game, and that was all it took. He was he was sold. So, anyway, I I think we have some really good arenas and great sporting events that sort of help perpetuate any kind of sport here. Indoor, outdoor, in the arena. Yeah, you asked a really important question about our stats, uh, and specifically about our in inbound traffic and inbound traffic patterns. And I think it's especially important this year because obviously we're seeing um a decline in international travel. And so we know that there is and we are very much tied to um sentiment and what we call brand health of both the United States and obviously we are stewards of the California brand and California's brand health. At Visit California, um what we are doing from a marketing perspective is leaning pretty heavily into uh both international and domestic markets, but in different ways. In the international markets, we have about we have 13 markets where we are specifically focused, and that means we've got offices in those markets, and they represent the majority of our travel to uh California from an inbound perspective and our projected future travel. Um and so those offices are incredibly important because they're on-the-ground extensions of Visit California, and they have traditionally been our sales channels and feeding back, intelligence and information that's qualitative and substantiating a lot of our internal research that we're getting. Um we've got a great team at Visit California focused on really supporting uh those regional markets and putting taking our core marketing program and extending that. Domestically, we've got a brand budget. So we're spending um dollars specifically to reach consumers with our key message, and we can talk more about how we do that and what we do because that's shifting quickly. But I spoke about advertising and and the importance of advertising and paid content distribution and organic content and how that all works together in an ecosystem to create a storytelling platform, and that is what we do domestically. We are targeting those people that uh have an interest in coming to California, and we're very lucky that that's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And it will continue to be for sure. So that this is where as marketing has changed, and you know, you mentioned that you know the priority was TV campaigns, and now it's it's a combination of um um online channels, and and so tell us a little bit about the marketing mix today and specifically about technology, like what role uh technology plays, because obviously with those with those ads, you're trying to get people to you know to the Visit California website and then to learn more information. So tell us a little bit what the marketing mix looks like today, and then what what role technology plays in that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, now you're singing the tune I love because I think that you can create all the great messages you want that resonate and that are brilliant strategy, but if you cannot connect them to the right people at the right time, then they're falling on deaf ears. And and so our ability to use technology to target our audiences, um, specifically in media, but also across all our channels. I think um I'll use the word storytelling instead of content because I feel like that is a word uh and a storytelling platform has the ability to create messages that people want to hear. Right? They're engaging. You you are creating a storytelling platform here with with your show, right? And you put a lot of thought into how you do that, and and and and I think that it creates an engaging dialogue and relationship with a brand. It doesn't become a one-way here, we are the ultimate playground. You should think about a trip to California. Um, and and so and so all of that is theoretical, it where it kind of meets um more tactical executions is when we look at the assets we own, like our website, like our social media channels, like our podcast ourselves, we have one. Um, and and what we do to articulate those messages and to translate those messages in ways that work in a multimodal environment, and increasingly thinking about how are we delivering content for machines and how are we delivering content for humans. And I think that's the most simplistic way for me to describe it because it's very easy to get caught up in the technology, but to stay true to saying if we can create a platform that is discoverable by both machines and humans, that AI discoverability will pay off the investment we've made in this storytelling platform. And we're sort of calling it uh an advanced content platform, which has AI discoverability, it has distribution, production, and obviously the technology that underlies it all and enables it.
SPEAKER_00:That's really interesting. And I guess that's where, you know, currently with people looking up California and doing their research, and as part of the reason I was keen to ask the question about you know who you're speaking to and prioritizing international, domestic, um, and local, because I would because of I guess I would qualify as international and local when I was living there because I would do all sorts of searches to try and figure out what else I was gonna see while we were living in California. And I was watching all these YouTube videos of people, and and I should actually call it you mentioned your podcast, which is which is fantastic. It's uh I listened to a couple episodes and it's called California Now for any of our listeners, which you can find. Yeah. And um, and to me, that's just like you know, it's Visit California and California Now, this is like these are the so I very much was in a California Now mo um frame of mind when I was living there. I wanted to go to Yosemite, I wanted to see all the national parks. I was um and so when it comes to this platform and how you guys are leveraging, I guess, Visit California, because that's something that I I was also utilizing to see like things to do. And um so so tell us, I guess, how important the website is and and being able to showcase everything that uh California has to offer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. When when you so the website's shifting its role a little bit in in the consumer ecosystem, and I suppose we'll get to that in a moment, but the website is a critical component of our program today, and we see it continuing uh to perform important functions as we move forward. I I will say this about um the website, it is also the only program that we can draw a straight line to an incremental billion dollars to the tourism economy in California. Last year we crossed that billion dollar mark through our research and talking to people that have come here and visited the website or like yourself, listen to content that we have put through our own channels called California Now and and and really tried to do authentic storytelling that serves consumers and helps them in their travel planning journey, which is complex even with small states and small getaways, like to your point. But when you're talking about$150 billion plus tourism economy, um, you're really talking about a lot of options for your vacation. I heard um, I heard on one of your earlier podcasts um someone talk about the complexity of the tourism ecosystem. And um, and I love hearing people outside of California talk about complexity because I think in California we think, wow, this is so complicated because of the number of players we have in our tourism ecosystem funnel and the number of options that travelers have today uh for information sources. And I think we're all here uh to try to make that easier for them and to try to provide information so that they can find what they're looking for quickly. Um, and everybody has a different role in in providing that.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's interesting you mentioned about websites and their relevance, which is one of the things that I find fascinating, especially now in this age of AI. I heard someone actually describe it at a conference. I was in Orlando a few days ago at this digital travel summit conference, and one of my colleagues from Hotel Planner described AI as the new internet. It's like there's this new there's a I love saying there's like, have you heard there's this new internet? And it's it's uh uh it made me laugh, but it was also you because it is the idea of like you associate Google as the internet, and then you associate Chat GPT as this new internet, this new interface. And the part that I find fascinating, because I'm always uh obsessing over consumer behavior, that was you know such a big role for me in my career throughout marketing and a big focus of our podcast is like how consumer behavior is changing. And one of the things that another presenter, Brennan from Propelic, who's one of our partners, he was just had done this report that highlighted that today, uh with SEO dropping for a lot of uh a lot of uh organizations, you know, it's uh that search uh generative search traffic is now about 5%, uh, but it could be as much as 50% in two years. And there's all this talk about what is the future of websites in an age where people are using AI tools for planning. And this is where you know, you being ahead of the curve, I'm keen to get your take on this because you have such a large remit, such an important part of the country that you're responsible. For. So how are you? I'm genuinely keen to ask you this kind of open question about how you are seeing AI and how you're embracing it as an organization.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I this is my favorite question. So I and it's my favorite question because I, you know, I love the idea that we can't control the stream that we are playing in. Right. And I love that because I think it's part of it's it's by definition, our environments are always the marketing environment in which we play is always not in our control. But if you look at AI, it is exponentially moving more quickly than we can keep up. And so I'll tell you a philosophy and then I'll be very specific with my response because my philosophy is don't try to control it. Definitely monitor it. And uh, if you're sitting on the bank waiting for the stream to stop moving, you're gonna grow old waiting because there are different changes every single day. And so um that it can be very overwhelming, I think, for marketers to say, how do I solve this? How do I think about this for my organization? Particularly because, and I heard Chris say this, so I'll repeat it uh on your podcast. He said, um, it's not, you know, travel isn't a particularly um technology-oriented sector. Now, I think many of your listeners are, so obviously. Um, but I think um it makes it a really interesting and complex problem, which is what I think our organization enjoys approaching. And so what we did a couple of years ago is we wrote a technology roadmap very, very simply. It was about, I don't know, three years ago. And it was um a technology roadmap, not based on what we heard from the industry, but from like a technology strategy class at Berkeley to listen to how AI works and what the foundations are in an evergreen way, not like what's the latest sizzly toy, but what what is it really? And where are the opportunities and what are the ethical considerations and how should we be thinking about resourcing it? And if we're running large organizations, what's the best way to do that? And and and it really sort of helped us frame up a couple of questions. And I'll just um I'll just say these questions were written a few years ago. They were about should we be thinking about this for our business now? Just like really simple questions. And there's like things that now people are already looking at. What we did is we took that and said, okay, let's look at, you know, how would I start evaluating tech platforms? What is the timing from start to finish and the execution of any kind of project like this? Is it distracting or is it something I can build upon for my organization? And as we started to think about it internally within our marketing team, we started to also think about, and we know that our industry is going to need tools and enablement and education. And what should our role be? And it was really hard for us to say what our role should be because I think it wasn't a problem to be solved. It is an environmental factor to be part of. And if does that make sense? And so if you think about it that way, the only way to think about focusing on it is to create some guidelines and guardrails for yourself so that you don't go so far over exploration that you forget your core business. And so our approach uh to AI and how we thought about it was what's some low-hanging fruit? Uh, you know, besides the management piece, educating your people, putting in guidelines for the organization, making sure we protect our IP and all of those important things. Um, and I started talking to leaders in in technology and travel to find out what they were thinking. And I just um I and I knew I had an opportunity. We were launching a new road trip site. We've got 600 pieces of content in Drupal, but 72 curated pieces of editorial. I have 60,000 editorial pieces, tons of professional editorial. It's a really great AI problem uh in terms of creating personalized and dynamic itineraries that we might be able to approach. And so I went to a friend in Silicon Valley and I said, I'm trying to educate myself. And she said, Oh, you should talk to one of my founders. And um, that was the founder of Mind Trip, Andy. So that was like a kismet moment. I called him up two years ago and he didn't have staff yet. And I said, you know, my friend told me from Costa Noah Ventures, told me I should call you. And he said, Yeah, I'm doing a travel application. But he had been a very um, he had been a very, very successful serial entrepreneurial entrepreneur, and I had learned enough in the Silicon Valley to know that we weren't selecting a technology, we're selecting people behind a technology that were willing to work in a partnership fashion. And so that's what I was looking for. I talked to a lot of other people too. They were doing great things. Um, and so I think it's been a collective effort. We launched uh last March our um AI version, or I'm gonna say we we actually took our existing website and we put an AI module on it and we've let it incubate to watch how consumers are using it, and it has been a fantastic, fantastic experiment.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I want to get into that because I'm genuinely curious to know what you've seen and how the consumer journey has changed. I like that you mentioned the whole, you know, just kismet connection in California, but that's one of the amazing things about not only the valley, but California and the industry that's there. And it's certainly, you know, there has been this um uh the trends emerge from California and they kind of go up the coast and then they spread from west to east and they eventually get back to where you grew up and where I'm based. And like uh but it doesn't always work that way with trends, but there is certainly a lot to be said for that. That California's often been ahead, and some of these trends either make their way across the country or they don't. But when they do, this is an emerging long-term trend. And I think the the thing, you know, you mentioned that was two years ago. I mean, uh Chat GPT came out three years ago to the public, and it's amazing to think that it's been three years now, or it's been two years since you had that conversation, and now how fast we're moving. So tell tell us you know what what you what you've seen, like you know, in that time in the last year. Tell us about the some of the the insights that you've been able to glean about. I I'm endlessly intrigued about how people are using it as a planning tool. I think that's one of the big developments. So many people are using it and going into travel agents saying this is now what I want to book. They're educated and informed. Yeah, what what have you seen?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I um well first let me tell you what gave me the confidence to make the investment. We did a consumer journey study, and I think you'll be interested in this, particularly because you were asking about the consumer journey. And in the consumer journey study, we were trying to find out sort of relative influence on destination selection of different tools. So, how many people are using print or OTAs and where they're getting their inspiration from and their planning consideration? And as we sort of were putting that out, I sat down with my research team and said, we've got to ask about AI. And my research team was like, no, it's too early. It's like it was, and they were right, it was too early, but I wanted to get an early baseline uh to try to understand. And what came what came back for us was um what is a dream for me. It was what I was hoping would come back, which was obviously there are generational differences. Um, about at the time that we did this, which was last year, of course, this is all different now. And focus right, I think, is announcing something like on average, 30% of people are using AI. So, but but at the time we did this, uh, we got about 8% of people. And what I really wanted to find out is if they knew what an LLM was and if they knew what what search was, and if they considered search summaries, AI or search. And if you hit AI mode, do you know that that sits under Gemini? Like, where are people uh in their understanding? Consumers, general mass population. And so we came back with about 8%. But when we asked of the people who had used uh that eight percent what their satisfaction levels was, it was 93%. Wow. I know pause for dramatic effect. So 93% for a marketer of likelihood to recommend, that tells you that this thing is going to move like wildfire. And if we don't jump in early and quickly to understand user behavior patterns, it's just it's a missed opportunity. And so we moved super quickly at that time. Um and and sort of with the confidence of that research to say, let's do something on open AI, let's work with a progressive company. Um, and so Mind Trip, who was the original person that I had called for advice on AI, um, it turns out that uh they he he he he uh had hired a team and brought his folks in, and we worked together in uh what we really needed, which was a partnership. Because uh I have used the word ecosystem and I'm not using it lightly. I think none of us could do this by ourselves, and I don't mean the strength of like our individual subject matter expertise. I mean it takes an incredible lift to be able to support consumers with uh authentic content in meaningful ways in an AI ecosystem. And particularly because we don't control what's happening in the search behavior right now. We don't we don't control what's happening, let's just call it in big tech. Um, but we do control our ability to talk to them and partner and figure out how we make our content more discoverable. And so we thought, well, let's just deep dive into the content we have. And we were in a lucky position. We have lots of content. We have six million assets in our UGC library, like our digital assets, audio assets, short form video assets, and and and and curated content uh that had come up through an editorial process were very meaningful and just perfect training data for what we were trying to put together. The vision that we had that we're still working on, and I think brand USA is doing a fantastic job. And I'm so pleased that they ended up selecting the same um architecture because I think that creates additional possibilities for us on a national level to uh be able to think about RAG models that really serve the consumer and have access to a vast store of our content and data. Um, and that is the only acronym I'm gonna use on this whole call.
SPEAKER_00:We've got to make sure our listeners know what that means. So do you mind actually just clarifying it?
SPEAKER_01:Retrieval augmented generative models. So this is really the way that I think about RAG is um, and I think it's important to think about it, but it's sort of a tech stack that sits on OpenAI. And so if OpenAI is the foundation for Mind Trip, and then we are populating Mind Trip with the content that we have developed that specializes in California, and then we have wonderful destinations that jumped in even ahead of us with this in Monterey, Truckee, these great destinations, and they are also creating content libraries that help us understand what they're doing in sustainability, in uh real information around Highway One, and so very granular local content. Now enter brand USA with national content, and we can start to create a beautiful picture for consumers who really don't begin and end all of their destinations within state boundaries all the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I would the reason I wanted you to clarify that too, and think for our audience is that, you know, in thinking through AI, and this is where we're trying to just demystify it for those people that are not as conversant in the technology, but you know, there's three layers to it. I mean, there's the chips and the data centers, there's the LLMs, and then there's these applications that are built on top of those. And this is where it's really exciting. It's like that first phase of websites being built. Um, and but at that point during that dot-com revolution that we both lived through, you knew where to go. You know, you knew you needed a website and you'd find a web agency. And so, right now, I think most people, even in hearing what you just described, which is you know, rather than working directly with OpenAI, you have all this amazing content, but you it's also proprietary content, and you have to be mindful of what you're otherwise training the machine on. So how how and so tell us a little bit of, yeah, I this is the part I'm really intrigued to understand, and I think our listeners will be too, is that you know, in order to take an organization like yours that has all this amazing content, you need to make sure that you're staying relevant and connecting with international and domestic travelers that want to come to California, whether it be them, searching your website and then getting you know planning tools or even um uh the ability to chat with them. But you know, the there's been so much potential unlocked with generative AI, and clearly you've been leveraging Mindtrip to be able to do that. But when when you started working with an organization like Mindtrip, what were some of the, I guess, the the challenges to be aware of for any organization embracing this new path? You know, in terms of getting your data and your content in order in such a way to be able to utilize it and surface because it's different with a website as you know, when you decide, okay, here's our top-level navigation, here's the here's the destinations you're going to promote. And this is exactly the point that you made, Lynn, that I found really interesting, which is that you can't control everything. You just need to make sure that you give it all the information, and then a user can retrieve that based on what they're searching for. So tell us a little bit about that, because I'm sure people will find that interesting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I'll and I'll go back to your other question too, which is about what we've found uh so far. But let's talk about the execution of the platform because uh one of the challenges is resources. I didn't I didn't have two data engineers and website developers and content people sitting around looking for a project, right? You're already at 100% um capacity. And I think uh our content teams were wonderful and and and website teams and embracing the change, but it is change management at its at it at its core. Um there's a paradox there though. So you're talking about um things that are both easier and more difficult than web development. They're easier in that by its very nature and LLM is natural language processing. So there are ways to develop and create feedback loops that are far easier and more scalable than the traditional data feed model. I'm going to create a data structured data table that feeds into my CMS that creates, you know, content pieces that I'm going to aggregate, um, as opposed to um other ways of creating new content that um that actually borrow from the editorial process. And I'm gonna just describe my traditional editorial process because I think that's part of the secret sauce. And we believe strongly in this. So um you hear people say all the time to you know, leverage technology but stay human-centered. Um, and so what does that mean exactly? The way that we translate it, and I believe in this too, is that that the editorial process is fundamentally founded on human creativity. And human creativity is uh also part of that, is just knowing what's going to happen next. So if I've had a phone call with a major California business and I understand what they'll be packaging next year, that doesn't exist in digital content anywhere. AI is not going to be able to provide that. If I know that that where the Olympics are destinations are going to be held in 28, which everybody knows and it's publicly available information, but maybe I have some information specific to different kinds of content that we should be packaging. And so that getting at the top of that training data and determining how to feed that information in is, I think, where the magic lies. And it is the intersection of human curation and machine scalability. And I'm not just saying that to be pithy. I really believe it, it's part of the roadmap.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and what's the one of the things that's uh the complexity of a role like yours as well, which uh on this series, I mean, this is like a perfect way to uh conclude this series from my point of view, having a conversation with you about Visit California given the size and the scale and how early you are, but also and the the learnings, which I want to get into here in a moment, some of the other insights you have. But the one of the things I just wanted to highlight was the complexity of the all the stakeholders that you have, and like one of them being all of the points of interest within the state that clearly want to be featured. So you you know, it used to be the case that you could kind of marry the two together in a in a web environment. You've got to cater to these visitors, and then you also have to manage the expectations of all these stakeholders and and and how much attention their region is going to get or their you know their wineries, and and so how do you manage that component as well as you're building something out? Because you've I you have to have the consumer mindset first, um, but you also need to make sure that you are surfacing the right information that is going to convert best and also represent the entire, you know, all of the communities throughout California.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I I think one of the things, and I can give you some very specific examples, but one of the things we're able to do is create relative weight based on what we've already written about. So this is obviously all sitting on an open AI platform. And you know, you've hit on some of the the Achilles heel of what we need to look at. Businesses close. And I would never write an itinerary that said, here's all the things you should do, and this business is closed. That just would not be something that I would write. But uh what you know, when you're working with an AI agent, those things do happen and they do come up, right? That's part of the uncontrollable environment. And we're lucky right now that consumers, it actually lends a little air of, I think, authenticity to what we're doing. Um, but that's my that's not that's not research, that's a personal opinion. Um, I think that general discoverability of California content is a challenge. And then general discoverability. So if you are, let's just take say Los Angeles or maybe uh Temecula, and you're saying, Oh, I just did a search on a Southern California destination on your website, and I'd love to see these things be surfaced. What it does is it changes the editorial function because then what we can do is go back and look at our content. This is where our content repository is amazing. We run editorial scrums like every week. We are creating and pulling in content through our human channels and our sales channels all the time. And so that doesn't go away with AI. What it does is it layers in an AI perspective to say, hey, this came in and let's take a look at where these destinations are featured. And does it make sense vis-a-vis consumer behavior? And so the last thing, I just don't want to give anyone um it's a balancing act in terms of making sure that we are being complete, that we are being thoughtful, and that we are giving consumers exactly what we're looking for. And this is what make makes marketing California so great, because pretty much anyone that calls us and says, could we get visibility, we're like, yes, please. Um because because there are, and I shouldn't say pretty much, all California businesses. Um we we have and see uh value in representing what they do, and we've got an opportunity to tell great stories that way.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. And um, one thing on the data that you mentioned that I had my wow reaction to, and I just wanted to underscore that and go back to it as we talk about the data and get some additional insights from you on the trends and what you're seeing. This is one of the ones that stood out to me. And the reason that um when I look at a company like Travel AI, who's been a great partner with us as well, and Travel AI runs many websites, and John Leotier, who's the s the they're based up in uh Vancouver, he shares a lot of his insights on LinkedIn to his credit, and could partly because he wants to see if other people are seeing the same thing. He can he can kind of hide away these success stories just to have personal benefit from them, but credit to him, he shares them. But and one of the ones that he was highlighting uh over the last six months is the conversion rates of people who are using AI tools can be like three or four times greater. So rather than a 10% conversion rate, it can be a 30 or 40% conversion rate because someone has done their research and this is and they now they now have decided this is where they want to go, this is what they want to do, and they're committed, they're committed to realizing that. So that so your point about it much the same um uh out output, like it's consistent, but this is new data. Yeah, this is new data. We're only just starting to understand how consumers are being impacted by this technology.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, you're you're asking me my favorite question. I get I get this, and I love I love this part of the conversation because um, well, frankly, because it's working and I don't need to look at data and I don't need to look at metrics. When people say to me, How's your web traffic? I say, Do you mean how's my web engagement? Because my web traffic is going down. But I'm kind of thankful to Google for that because what they're doing is answering the basic questions. And my hypothesis is then consumers are saying, huh, those are I have a complex. Let's just take it. I'm coming to California, I have two kids and a dog. I'd love to see something different than San Francisco and LA, but I know I would like to see both of those regions. Please give me some recommendations. That is probably what a Google search looks like right now in AI mode. And so I love that because it's the first line of education. And if I treat it as the first line of education, then it tells me what the orientation of my content should be, which is to assume that that referral traffic is going to be fact-checking, creating a level of, I think the product managers at Google say confidence in their vacation decisions. And so if that's your if that's your product vision, which I love, then it speaks to integrity in the content and it speaks to a level of of relatively deep content. But at the end of the day, the authoritative voice on California is comes from Visit California and Visit California's partners. And so by creating that, that's what's happening today. Do I think that's going to happen in the future? And how that's going to happen? I think the content will always be there. The delivery mode and the platforms and the methods uh are what will shift.
SPEAKER_00:But it's exciting. And I kind of you but you can often start to see what's just around the corner then by virtue of seeing those trends, having a look at the uh the consumer journey changes and knowing that that is going to increase converti. And you can say to partners, if they've used this tool um and they're coming to you with a finalized itinerary, whether it be a travel advisor or even going direct to a supplier, that's one of the things that has been clearly disrupted already, or uh and appears to is OTAs, online travel agencies. This is one of the big questions is what is their role? Because they they obviously wanted to work with tourism boards as well to promote different destinations. And tourism boards used to market themselves on OTAs, um, but now all of a sudden there's a high potential that they are being disintermediated and that and consumers are going direct to suppliers ready to book because they've done all their homework and research. It's no longer this exact experience that you and I have known for 20 years, where we do a they do a search engine result, we get taken to an OTA website, we look at a bunch of different hotels, and then we go ahead and book. Um so so yeah, so tell me where you think this is headed. Like what are some of the things that now excite you about how you the potential of this in 2026 and beyond?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, you asked some really interesting questions in there. I'm gonna break it down into specifically a milestone that we hit in July, which is the click-through on our AI links on our road trip page, surpass the curated content links. This is critical for us. And we executed this program purposefully almost as a giant research project. We had a landing page for road trips, it had three different entry port points. One was assuming that people were maybe early in the planning stages and they did a quick quiz and it gave them search results. The second was that we were um creating handcrafted, curated by California experts. So we're saying, look, a human looked at this. Um, and the third one was AI, and that was the mind trip application. And we were seeing that middle option being the clear favorite early on. And we were seeing that middle option being the clear favorite. And this was again, now we don't control how they're getting to us. So let's just leave the search functionality and that growth in the last year off the table for a moment and say people were coming for curated content that they knew a human had touched. I think it was early days for trusting AI. That is now we're seeing a shift. I also think we're seeing repeat traffic and that high sort of likelihood to recommend that we had seen earlier in our studies are coming through, and those people are now starting to go straight to AI. It's giving us so much confidence that we're looking at other places in the website where we think we can solve problems and in our content cycle. So that's that's one thing. The second thing I'll say is those that come in through AI spend uh about nine minutes on the website. That I can't even that's a long time for our website because our website's goal is to get you off onto other websites and other businesses in California. We don't want you to spend time planning on our website. We want you to go booking on our partner websites if we can. But um, but so that's a that those are some early findings for us. The other thing that I will tell you is that uh from a reporting perspective, we took the reporting that comes in through the queries and we started to match it with our Google Analytics, and we also started to do an overlay to take a look at topic modeling and segmentation. And so a lot of very interesting things came out of that that were specific to um, I'll just say, like in international. This is what surprised me. Why are there so many Spanish language queries? Like and and discussions. And then I started, I couldn't have possibly um anticipated this because I couldn't have, but it this whole function, it ended up being almost fact-checking for people who are looking at the English language website and then wanting to go much deeper and much more personalized in their um in their first languages. And so there's a lot of interesting little things that you don't expect that come up that help us give us ideas and things that we didn't see in the original roadmap.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that's fascinating. I really appreciate sharing that with us because you know, you and you'll appreciate this as both a marketer and someone based in California and that and and focused on technology. Um, and being of um uh relative contemporaries, you and I, I think uh one of my landmark books uh cross. The chasm by Jeffrey Moore way back in the 90s, right? And I feel like that commonality that we started our conversation with about the internet, new internet, is that you know when we look at tools like this, we are very much you had your innovators and then you have your early adopters, and obviously you're across both of those. And then the question is, you know, when do we hit that early majority, late majority, and the laggards? And like crossing this chasm. It seems to me with um with tools like these, like we're we're just getting that we're crossing the chasm. Like we're these are the tools that all of a sudden now we'll get much wider adoption. And um, and so the one thing I would I know you've given so much valuable advice in this entire conversation. I've just been like I've found it so fascinating. I would but I would love to go back to just this question about um advice for other marketers because the reason I wanted to frame it in that way is because you are an innovator and early adopter, but many people on listening to this are you know they're they're a lot of this would have been valuable information, but they're so early, and they're trying to figure out what what do I do, how do I, how do I, how do I get on this path, and how do I start realizing benefit and their or inside their organization, they may not have an AI roadmap, they don't necessarily and so I'd love for you to be able to share some advice for those tourism boards, those DMOs around the world that are looking to you as an example to say, what should I be doing? And it's not just about choosing the platform, it's really obviously as an organization, you know, a culture change and kind of realizing that we have to embrace this and and we can't get left behind because we're we'll make our we'll make our our region irrelevant if people can't discover us in this new world of AI search. So, yeah, I'd love for you to kind of finish off with some additional advice from your point of view to everyone out there that could really benefit from some additional insights.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I don't know if I'm an innovator. I think I get to live in California, and so we do have an obligation to lead, and I have a very um broad view of what travel means to people and what it means to our our economy. So I think staying true to that value, and what I mean by a broad view is I I think travel is one of like it's it's a form of diplomacy, right? Like we get to do this every day. We used to have a a board chair that said that. And and so what my advice is to myself is to stay open and curious, um and in and understand that this is a fast moving stream. And so one of the things that we try not to do is invest in anything that's going to create a dead end, uh, either from a technology perspective or that won't allow us to pivot easily. So that's a practical advice point. I think that um empowering your team, sharing your learning is uh a fast way to support a culture of learning. And and the tourism industry has done a great job, destination internationals, US Travel, Brand USA really embracing this and looking at ways that we can be helpful. And I think it's really helped our teams uh to do that. And we've got great, great partners. I also think looking outside of our uh industry, I I said that early on, and I and I I see that with people who are trying to learn from aerospace and trying to learn from consumer packaged goods and trying to learn from um healthcare. These are these are um segments that are very different than ours, but but they're and they're using AI in different ways, and it may spark some thoughts about uh technology you want to use. And then lastly, I would say um with this current wave of VC that has gone into the industry and the um I think we're about to see a tidal wave of applications coming our way in tools and AI offerings. So first it was like, I'm overwhelmed by what AI is, and then it's like, how am I gonna use AI? And then it's gonna be like, how do I answer all these vendors who are trying to sell me AI? Um, and so I think we need to stay tighter, tighter. Like, one of the things I I love about working in California is that we are truly a collaborative ecosystem. And so if I have a question, I can call up my friends in LA or San Diego and we we talk about what we should be doing and we work together to understand that we're part of it. And I think that our ability to share information and provide uh tools to one another so that we're looking through a lens uh consistently and that uh this is not a I am not competing with the pace of technology and I am not a technology company, but I will compete at the pace of consumer behavior.
SPEAKER_00:That's a fantastic way to put it because I think this is where so many people, and I'll include myself in the travel industry working in a marketing capacity, are not technologists, and it's very hard to keep up with technology and to know what technology to embrace. And I love that you also just mentioned something that I clearly we're gonna be inundated with is all of these options. I mean, we're seeing it already now with you know, from moving from search engine optimization to generative engine optimization and tools that are all of a sudden coming out to help companies just understand their discoverability in LLMs and what they can do. And it's very early, and a lot of that technology isn't perfect, um, but companies need to be aware of it. And uh um I saw that at a conference, people asked, what tools should we use? And there were six different examples, and people were writing them down, and um, but it's still very early. So I I I think you know there's been so many valuable insights from this conversation. I've so thoroughly enjoyed uh meeting you, Lynn, and being able to talk to you about marketing and tourism boards and the world that we live in and where where we're headed. Um I'd love to leave you with the last word and also to make sure that people can uh find more information about Visit California to be able to connect with you and and make sure we tell people all the places they should be able to go to to reach out to you or connect with the organization after this.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, thanks. Well, this has been fantastic. I know there's uh there's not enough open dialogue about what people are learning and frankly, uh how they're failing. That that's how you learn.
SPEAKER_00:Fail fast, exactly. The fail fast.
SPEAKER_01:Um, but we've had I've had a good time sp speaking with you. So I uh I look forward to seeing people online. Um I'm very interested in in seeing what other people are doing. So if anybody, anything here sparked. If I were listening to myself right now, I'd be saying, How are you doing this with a staff with a small staff? Who are you hiring? What are your resources? I'm sure there's a million questions. I'm happy to answer them. Um, I am L Carpenter at visitcalifornia.com.
SPEAKER_00:Wonderful. Thank you for sharing your email. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your time with us. Uh, I look forward to meeting you in person at some point in the near future, or likely maybe in San Diego at the Focus Right Conference later this year. That would be great. Thank you, Lynn. Really appreciate you making time for this.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks so much for joining us on this special three-part series on how AI is impacting destination marketing. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed the conversation here in part two with Lynn Carpenter, the senior vice president of marketing for Visit California. I found our conversation so incredibly inspiring, insightful. I learned so much, and I couldn't imagine this series having three better speakers than kicking off with Jeanette, having Lynn today. And then next week, you're gonna have the CMO for Discover Puerto Rico joining us, Storm Tussey. So make sure you're subscribed on the streaming platform of your choice. These episodes are releasing every Thursday, but you can find clips and highlights as well on our social channels, which are LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram at Travel Trends Podcast. And thanks again to our friends at Mind Trip for sponsoring this series. Until next week, save travels.
