Visit California has integrated Mindtrip’s AI planning platform into its road trips hub, turning a library of curated driving routes into itineraries a traveler can adjust for themselves. The state tourism board announced the partnership on March 4, 2025, as part of California Active Inspiration, its technology and travel initiative.
What It Does
The hub holds seventy-four road trips, each one hand-built and locally vetted by California Travel Experts. Before, a traveler picked one and took it as given — a four-day itinerary in front of someone with six days left them to do the adapting. The planner turns any of them into a starting point: multi-stop planning, the route plotted on a map, distances worked out and the trip reshaped around where someone actually wants to begin.
It reads more than the road trips. The platform indexed Visit California’s content across the website and its content management system, so the planner draws on the library the state has spent years building rather than on a separate set of AI-generated suggestions. At launch that indexing was current enough to route travelers around the Los Angeles fire closures.
The surface was translated into nine languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Korean and German.
Caroline Beteta, President and CEO of Visit California, framed it as a planning experience — the board is “committed to providing travelers with the most enriching and seamless planning experience possible.” Andy Moss, Mindtrip’s co-founder and CEO, put the emphasis on the trips themselves, saying the partnership shows the industry the ways AI “can improve real world travel.”
The Work
Pare built the integration. Mindtrip ships as HTML snippets a site can paste in, and on a state’s flagship tourism platform that would have been an off-brand overlay free to recommend anything the open internet says. The engagement was the space between the two: a planner that opens inside the page as My California Trip, with the conversation staying on visitcalifornia.com.
The state’s own work is what the AI starts from. All seventy-four road trips are structured content in Drupal, exposed over its API and mapped one-to-one to Mindtrip guides, so customizing an itinerary begins from the editors’ version. Around that sit the conditions the rest of the site already met: California-only itineraries as a hard rule, adversarial prompt testing before launch, an accessibility audit delivered to Mindtrip ahead of the integration and planner events reporting into the same analytics stack as everything else.
It went out in stages — a percentage of US English traffic first, then a public pilot, then a beta timed to the campaign TV spot — with each phase widening only after the last one held.
The platform underneath is work we did too: the rebuild of Visit California’s data layer on JSON API, which took content updates from hours to minutes and the desktop home page from 25.41 MB to 3.61 MB. An engine that indexes an entire content library is a demanding reader of it.
About Pare
Pare is an AI-native digital consultancy, founded in 2007 as Oomph and rebuilt in 2026 for the AI age. The firm builds websites, platforms, and digital products — and the intelligence inside them — for the organizations people depend on most.
Press inquiries: press@pare.co