Younger wine tourists : a study of generational differences in the cellar door experience

Abstract

The importance for wineries of visitation to cellar doors is recognised by both the tourism and wine industries (O'Neill and Charters, 2000). The quality of cellar door service plays a central role in the tourist’s experience of a winery and in the emotional attachments a tourist develops for a brand, and by implication, the future purchase intentions of that tourist (Charters and O'Neill, 2001; Dodd and Bigotte, 1997; Nixon, 1999;). Understanding cellar door expectations and experiences from the point of view of the wine tourist is essential to allow wineries to establish this loyalty (O'Neill and Charter, 2000). This chapter reports on research which examined the perceptions and experience of visitors to winery cellar doors in one wine region of Western Australia. It particularly focused on the perspective of younger wine tourists, who for current purposes are defined as those that are members of the Generation X and Generation Y cohorts, and sought to compare their experience and expectations of winery cellar doors with those of older wine tourists.