ENHANCING CONSUMER VALUE IN WINE TOURISM

Enhancing consumer value is an increasingly important trend in tourism and hospitality, yet the process remains poorly understood by researchers and managers. Wine tourism destinations, wineries, and cellar doors provide the perfect setting for investigating consumer value as they involve a range of attributes. Review and analysis of previous studies reveals the key attributes that must be provided, the most important involving excellent service quality and the setting and surroundings of each winery visited. Significantly, value-for-money is not an attribute sought by wine tourists, indicating that quality wine producers may receive a premium for their product through the provision of valuable wine consumer experiences. Thirteen extant studies of wine tourism experiences across a range of wine regions are meta-analyzed to identify and classify the key attributes. Studies are both qualitative and quantitative, and both approaches provided findings that are merged into a single matrix of key attribute types. The management and research implications for wine tourism are then discussed, as well as the limitations of analysis that combines qualitative and quantitative findings in multiple locations over time