Visit California Builds Strategic Partnerships with Global Airlines

Strategic airline partnerships play a pivotal role in enhancing Visit California's reach, impact, and influence. Visit California collaborates with key airline partners in-market to create dynamic campaigns that amplify not only the gateways, but the state's diverse attractions, experiences and destinations. Partnerships help us showcase California as a premier destination for travelers worldwide. These are some of the partnerships that are taking place this year.

Canada

Visit California partnered with Air Canada Vacations to promote California as the ultimate winter getaway through owned channel media buys and via partners such as Facebook, Globe and Mail and the The Weather Network. Tactics in the campaign include banner ads, destination pages and display ads.

To further promote California and ensure brand visibility across major airline partners, Visit California launched an integrated partnership with WestJet to drive consideration for California among travel audiences. As an element of the campaign, 30 cut downs of Eric Bauza's "Keeping Up With the Canadians" video ran as pre-roll on the WestJet Connect platform on all US-Canada routes in November and will run again in March 2024. Other partnership elements included co-branded banners on the WestJet website, inclusion as December Partner of the Month on Westjetvacations.com and programmatic digital ad buys targeting Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

Germany

In tandem with Condor Airlines’ growing nonstop services from Frankfurt, Germany, to both major gateways SFO and LAX for the full summer schedule May-Oct. 2024, Visit California is again partnering with Germany’s most beloved vacation airline for a digitally-led 360 campaign from May into July. Designed as an industry co-op, Visit California is engaging consumers and travel agents alike with Visit California wrapped Velobikes cruising the streets of Frankfurt, social media posts, blog articles, newsletters and inspiring content placed within the Condor travel agency network and beyond.

Japan

Capitalizing on the year of tourism between the United States and Japan and as a follow-up to the CEO mission held in March 2023, Visit California entered into partnerships with ANA (All Nippon Airways)  and H.I.S. Partnerships help showcase California as a premier destination for travelers worldwide. The partnership with ANA GranWhale will feature two California destinations — Joshua Tree National Park and Bodie State Historic Park — on its new Metaverse platform, launched in December.

Nordics

In one of the newest airline mergers and acquisitions, SAS (Scandinavian Airlines Systems) has been acquired by Air France-KLM, Delta with 20% of shares, 32% of their stakes bought by Castlelake and 26% owned by the Danish government.

As a legacy carrier with consistent California gateway service, Visit California is partnering with the airline for a California spotlight campaign from Jan. through April 2024, encouraging spring and summer bookings out of Denmark and Norway to help protect and grow routing to SFO and LAX. Marketing through direct email outreach to SAS’ curated database, to paid social posts and California travel content on the sales portal. This is the first airline campaign with a Nordic airline since 2017 and Visit California is excited for the market’s relaunch.

South Korea

In collaboration with Asiana Airlines, Visit California orchestrated a product development FAM trip involving five notable tour operators and two influential LA-based receptive operators. This FAM focused on the exploration of three key destinations in Southern California: Greater Palm Springs, San Diego, and Los Angeles, aiming to revitalize the existing product offerings, often perceived as stagnant and uninspiring. The primary objective was to create exclusive California-only products that are refreshed and appealing to the younger millennial generation. Each receptive operator crafted multiple California-only products that were provided to tour operators to promote to their client base.

United Kingdom

Visit California joined with Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Atlantic Holidays on a robust, full-funnel partnership that brings together commercial, trade and brand priorities while bridging the gap between inspiration and purchase.

Launched on Boxing Day, Peaks is Virgin's new year sales campaign targeting U.K. travelers during the busiest booking period of the year. Virgin Atlantic is responsible for 27% of direct airlift into California, with 42 flights into LAX & SFO per week sending over 10,000 passengers to California.