Understanding the wine tourism experience: The roles of facilitators, constraints, and involvement

Abstract

Understanding the wine tourism experience is indispensable to the development of a wine tourism destination. This study tested an integrated model to obtain a better understanding of the wine tourism experience. The proposed model included both perceived wine tourism facilitators and constraints to examine their effects on wine tourism experience and tested the moderating role of involvement in these effects. Using Chinese outbound wine tourists in Australia as the study sample, this study identified that winery fame, interpersonal facilitators, and local attractions are three facilitating factors, while personal language and transportation barriers and time and information barriers were the perceived constraining factors. Both interpersonal facilitators and local attractions positively affected wine tourism experience; however, winery fame negatively influenced wine tourism experience. The study found that involvement moderated the effects of facilitators/constraints on wine tourism experience. For high-involvement wine tourists, the effect of local attractions is pronounced, while interpersonal facilitator negatively influences their wine tourism experience. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Interaction as a Central Element of Co-Creative Wine Tourism Experiences—Evidence from Bairrada, a Portuguese Wine-Producing Region

“…Our findings show that the stimulation of human interaction also has a positive impact on visitors' interaction with the physical environment [70] and that local resources contribute to deepening visitors' engagement in co-creative wine experiences, thus confirming several authors' findings [4,30,39]. The aesthetical dimension of Pine and Gilmore's model [18] also seemed to be enhanced, since natural elements of the wine landscape encouraged engaging experiences within the physical environment, as stressed by visitors.…”

“…Study results also confirmed the relevance of the learning process in wine experiences [1,10,30,31,71]. Visitors to this wine region revealed the importance of learning about local culture and wine production techniques and processes, mostly resulting from staff and local producers' interaction in different experience contexts.…”

“…One visitor pointed out the authenticity she felt in participating in the process of harvesting. As Antón et al [46] suggest for rich, immersive museum experiences, active and interactive tourist participation seems to also be applicable to wine tourism experiences, with co-creative contexts allowing tourists deeper involvement with the visited place [16,17,30,44,45,47]. This perspective may be applied to the present study, where active participation was facilitated by diverse experiences, including wine tastings, food and wine pairings, harvesting and also exploring the natural aroma of the destination if cycling.…”

“…Gift shops, restaurants, cafés and hosting events like weddings are also services that can be found in wine regions [28]. As pointed out by Dodd [10], wine is related to relaxation, social interaction, hospitality and learning new things, which are clearly promoted in the experiences previously referred to, raising tourists' involvement and bringing greater economic benefits for destinations [3,6,10,23,30,31]. Quadri-Felitti and Fiore [31] consider that the educational experience dimension is crucial to promote visitors' involvement in the experience, adding value, creating memories and enhancing loyalty.…”

New Tendencies in Wine Tourism in Tokaj Wine Region (Hungary): The Decreasing Role of Tokaji Aszú as a Dominant Brand

“…Research projects belonging to the second group focused on wine tourists. In this context, they explored their most important economic and social traits (Alonso et al, 2007), the factors that play a crucial role in participating in wine tourism, the expectations toward wine tourism (Grybovych et al ., 2013, Kóródi et al, 2020 and the experiences it has generated, which also largely determines satisfaction (Gu et al, 2020;Pelegrin-Borondo et al, 2020).…”