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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.

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