Wine tourism has evolved significantly over the years, from a wine tasting at the cellar door and the opportunity to purchase wine, to the desire for bespoke, interactive experiences like vineyard picnics and winemaker masterclasses. Offering bookable winery experiences can provide you with an additional tourism revenue stream, alongside your wine sales. This guide will provide you with tips on how to create bookable winery experiences and set them up to sell online. 

What is a bookable experience?

A bookable experience is a visitor experience that has a set price and can be booked and paid for in advance of a customer’s travel. Creating memorable visitor experiences at your cellar door allows you to build a relationship with your customers, encouraging brand loyalty, word of mouth and repeat visitation.

Why create bookable experiences? 

Customer engagement builds brand loyalty 

Creating unique and authentic bookable experiences that are tailored to your ideal customers, leaves them with great memories that they can share with others, building word-of-mouth marketing and loyalty to your brand.

Diversify your business

By giving your guests the opportunity to book and pay for an experience online, you are creating tourism revenue for your business in addition to your wine sales. Experiences that target your ideal customers are also more likely to attract visitors who will buy wine as well as pay for tourism experiences.

Manage cellar door bookings

Advance online bookings can help you manage the number of people in your venue, plan ahead to ensure you have the staffing and resources you need and collect important customer contact details.

Distribution

Like selling your wine via distributors, restaurants and bottle shops, bookable experiences can be distributed through third parties, such as the local visitor centre, accommodation providers and online travel agents including Expedia, Viator or Red Balloon.

Quick tips for developing bookable winery experiences

Look at your competitors

  • What are other wineries offering in your region, and in other wine regions in Australia and around the world?
  • What other experiences and attractions can you take inspiration from? These may be from outside the wine industry.

Think about your customer

  • What are your ideal customers looking for in an experience and how much will they spend?
  • How can you showcase specific wine styles that appeal to your different types of customers? For example, a more casual sparkling picnic brunch among the vineyards or an exclusive experience with the owner in a private room enjoying your reserve range of reds for wine connoisseurs. 

Build on your strengths

  • What are the key strengths of your venue, your grounds and your team? Does your property have a beautiful view at sunset? Do you have a winemaker with a fascinating history, or unique techniques to share?

Tell your story

  • Every winery has a story behind it and visitors want to engage with an authentic experience. Including elements of this story will help you to connect with your visitors.

Opening hours

  • If your cellar door isn’t open daily, it may be worthwhile opening exclusively for high value bookable experiences on additional days – even if you keep the cellar door closed for walk-ins. This will create more opportunities for visitors to find and book your experience.

Sensory experiences

  • Sensory journeys make wonderful wine tourism experiences. Consider pairing a wine flight with interesting tastes like local artisan produce, or aromas such as coffee, chocolate, citrus or oysters.

Transport

  • Work with local tour operators and transfer companies to help your visitors get to your venue so they can enjoy your wine experience.

Create sharable moments

  • How can you make your experiences Instagram-worthy? Consider setting up beautiful table settings with brand inclusions that visitors may photograph or create fun moments in your experience they want to capture and share.

Think outside the box

  • It’s a good idea to create experiences that will be your ‘bread & butter’ and are booked regularly such as picnics and food & wine pairings.
  • It may also be worthwhile creating experiences that are high value and are unique to your region – these may only be booked occasionally but may draw attention through the media and create word of mouth.

Quick tips for pricing

  • Wine tourism experiences are sometimes undervalued. Think of your experience as a tourism product that should be priced as such and not purely an incentive to drive wine sales. For example, an experience with the head winemaker might take two hours out of his or her day, so guaranteeing their time should be factored into a more premium price. Learn more about setting up your price in the NSW First Guide Develop Your Tourism Business guide.
  • It’s a good idea to build in distribution costs when you set the price for your bookable experience. This will enable you to distribute your product to a worldwide audience through travel distributors. For bookable tourism experiences, the maximum amount of commission you would expect to pay is 25-30%. Learn more about distribution costs in the NSW First Guide Sell Your Bookable Products Online.

Selling bookable winery experiences

Once you have created and priced your bookable tourism experiences, it is time to ensure they are easy to find and book online.

  • Showcase your new experiences clearly on your website, using inspiring images and clear descriptions to let the visitor know what they can expect when they visit.
  • Ensure that your experiences can be booked via a ‘book now’ button on your website. The NSW First Guide Sell Your Bookable Products Online is a resource that can take you through the necessary steps to: 

- Sell your products directly to customers via your website

- Work with third party distributors like online travel agents to make your products widely available online

Resources