First Time Here?

Welcome to the California Tourist Guide, an interactive, online travel resource organized with you in mind! The guide is designed to provide inspiration and information about California destinations and to help travelers organize and utilize the ideas they find. This article will provide tips for using the guide, and we think you’ll discover it’s quite easy to navigate the site, to find inspiration and information and to organize it for future usefulness.

To get started, simply choose an area and a service type in the box on the left and then click the “View Results” button. (To refine the search further, you can “deselect” sub-areas and sub-services on the lists.) The guide will then present information for you in the center column, divided among three tabs:

• The left-hand tab, General Info, is where you will find articles about the area you are researching.
• The middle tab will either be labeled Things to Do, Places to Stay, Places to Eat or Getting Around, depending on the service you selected, and will offer interesting ideas and/or service providers for your inspiration and information.
• The right-hand tab, Special Offers, will present the current “deals” those service providers are sharing with the guide’s audience.

The California Tourist Guide offers several features designed to make your travel research efficient and effective. As you investigate the guide, be sure to investigate:

• My Travel Ideas – an electronic folder where you can store interesting or useful information that you “flag” as you look through the guide. You can also edit and/or save your list of “flagged” items, email it to yourself or another person or apply Google’s mapping capabilities to it. These features are made available by clicking the “My Folder” button in the My Travel Ideas folder area.
• Map This – this feature uses Google’s mapping function to quickly geographically pinpoint the guide’s accommodation, dining and activities listings – either individually or as a group.
• Articles – these provide both general information about travel within the state (in the front page’s “Of Interest” section) and specific information about various locales (under the area-specific “General Info” tabs).

The guide can help you save money, too! As mentioned above, there are sometimes travel promotions and discounts under the area-specific “Special Offers” tabs, and you can also register to receive our California Tourist Guide email-newsletter (see the “My Folder” section) to keep apprised of any new offerings.

Thanks very much for visiting, and we hope you will enjoy using the guide to plan your perfect California vacation, holiday or getaway. We also hope you will consider adding us to your browser “Favorites” and that you will check back regularly, as we plan to add new content regularly. Please also feel free to use the link below if you have any questions or suggestions on how we might serve you better:

Contact California Tourist Guide