Our family was lucky enough to have been able to do a lot of visits before applying. My D visited her college without me, so when she said she wanted to ED there, I visited on my own, and had a bad, unimpressive visit. Tour guide was a flake, admissions presentation was disorganized, and they wouldn’t let you into the dorms at all. The guide made a sad joke about how awful the dorms are, how res life does a horrible job matching you with a roommate, and how bad the food is. My visit was during the summer, so couldn’t see what the true vibe was; they had a strong summer performing arts program so lots of those kids around, but almost no STEM kids were there.
Anyway, my point is that even if you visit, you could walk away with a totally inaccurate picture based on who happens to be on campus at the time, or what time it is in the semester (unhappy kids during mid-terms), or any number of other reasons.
CC actually helped me a lot with learning about the overall repetitional vibe of a school. Look up the schools you are interested in, and you will see lots of threads where people post asking for differences between several schools. You will see some great answers that can give you a really good idea as to flavor.
Some other avenues were our HS GC knew the flavors of different colleges well. And I looked at who from our HS went to which colleges during the prior several years. It was really interesting seeing the types of students the various colleges chose. And I talked to friends with older kids in other towns, and got feedback from them as to the kids they knew that went to that college and whether there was a common trait or what the experiences of those kids were. Finally, I looked on-line at the school newspaper to see what the hot button issues were.