An analysis of wine festival attendees’ motivations: A synergy of wine, travel and special events?

Abstract

As special-interest tourism, wine tourism is becoming increasingly important for wine-growing regions. But wine marketers are faced with a paucity of empirical data when examining wine tourists’ characteristics and behaviour. This issue needs to be addressed if marketers want to implement more effective strategies to target the market. Visiting wine festivals is an important component in the complete construct of wine tourism. What might have motivated the participants to visit such an event has become critical for wine-growing destinations when they attempt to use wine festivals to promote the wineries and regions. This research study used a survey instrument specially designed to test participants’ motivations to attend a regional wine festival in a Midwestern state in the USA. Both festival and wine tourism motivations were integrated in the measurement scale. The findings showed that attendees were motivated by a variety of factors which were associated with the focus on the different elements incorporated in the theme of the festival — a synergy of wine, travel and special event. Wine festivals can be used as a vehicle to attract younger people to become more interested in wine. They create a good venue to tap into future target markets for wine tourism development.

Attendee Motivations at an International Wine Festival in China

“…By attracting people interested in wine, wine festivals have become a key element of both the wine and tourism industries (J. J. Yuan, Cai, Morrison, & Linton, 2005a, 2005b. As wine regions have been at the forefront of developing festivals as part of a total wine (tourism) experience, the majority of wine festival studies tend to take place within large wine producing regions and wine tourism destinations.…”

“…In addition, such studies naturally link festivals with wine tourism development (J. J. Yuan et al, 2005a;J. J. Yuan, Morrison, Cai, & Linton, 2008).…”

“…Therefore, the main study objective is the exploration of motivating factors at the 2012 Dalian International Wine and Dine Festival, and whether motivating factors are influenced by the particular social, demographic, political, and cultural factors at work in China. As well as focusing on the cross-cultural validation of motivation wine (Hall, 1996), wine knowledge (Charters & Ali-Knight, 2002;Mitchell & Hall, 2001a, 2001bJ. J. Yuan et al, 2005a), generations (Dodd, Yuan, Adams, & Kolyesnikova, 2006), country of origin (Alonso, Fraser, & Cohen, 2007), repeat visitors versus first timers (Bruwer & Lesschaeve, 2012), and festival information sources (Shanka & Taylor, 2004), rather than motivations.…”

Employees’ perspectives of service quality in hotels

“…Although this model has been used as an instrument in various studies across industries, the SERVQUAL has received many criticisms from some scholars (e.g., Cronin & Taylor, 1992;Brown et al, 1993) and they are opposed to the use of SERVQUAL to measure service quality due to the differences in industry characteristics. However, other scholars have confirmed that the SERVQUAL instrument is applicable in the tourism industry (e.g., Fick & Ritchie, 1991;Yuan et al, 2005).…”

Značaj internet prezentacije za razvoj vinskog turizma Banata(Srpski i Rumunski Banat)

“…Njih možemo okarakterisati kao posetioce vinograda, vinarija vinskih festivala i vinskih prodavnica sa ciljem odmora [2]. Vinski turisti su obrazovani, imaju veća primanja i visoko interesovanje za vino [11].…”