When I’m out visiting wineries, I sometimes find I better remember the places that offered me a tour of their facilities. But is giving customers this special treatment worth the extra time and money? In this post, I’ll talk about some of my experiences as a customer on two very different types of winery tours–the Personalized Winery Tour and the Self-Guided Winery Tour–as well as share what I think are each of their pros and cons.
Personalized Winery Tour
As a customer, I think personalized tours are great fun. In my experience, they are typically offered by the winemaker or winery owner when he or she wants to give special customers–current wine club members, potential wine club members, high spenders–extra attention. Steve and I lucked out a couple of times last November on our visit to Colorado wineries. On our way to Rocky Mountain National Park, we stopped off at a winery in Estes Park. Steve asked one of the owners a bunch of questions about her wines, and after a few minutes we were invited to go downstairs. Our winemaker, a shaggy guy looking like he just emerged from a science lab, proceeded to show us his labor of love. His enthusiasm, like so many winemaker’s, was catching, and we enjoyed his stories of his latest concoctions. Steve and I walked away from our personalized tour experience feeling pampered, remember the winery in vivid detail, and will tell our friends about it.
As with most things though, personalized tours have their downsides as well. On our tour of wineries the next day, Steve and I stopped off to visit a tasting room outside of Denver. By the time we got there it was 15 minutes to closing. The winery owner though, a generous guy that you could tell had a big heart, spent over an hour with us and some other customers showing off his facility, pouring wines, and giving us recommendations for other things to see in Denver. The tour was great for us. Steve and I again felt really pampered. So much so that we signed up as case club members. But giving customers this extra special treatment was very time consuming for the winery owner. It was obvious he enjoyed spending time with us, but it must have been a juggling act with all of his other management responsibilities.
The Self-Guided Tour
The self-guided tour is just that: a tour that allows visitors independently learn about whatever you want them to–your winery, wine making, your region, your family, your employees, your history–you name it. An obvious upside to the self-guided tour is that it doesn’t cut into any of your time as a winery owner or winemaker. Next, and I find this interesting, it allows tasting room staff to get creative with crowd flow. I saw this at another winery we visited in Colorado. This winery had a very small tasting room, so Steve and I didn’t spend a lot of additional time at the tasting bar. But we did spend time walking through its nicely designed displays. The winery owner was also smart enough to set up a table showing off three or four wine baskets with information explaining their contents and prices. And if we wanted to, the tasting room staff told us we could purchase a glass of wine to sip while on our tour. I thought this idea was neat because it felt like the wine glass tied the tasting room to the self-guided tour and helped customers still feel pampered and catered to.
Sounds like the perfect tour option, right? Steve and I thought so too until we had a negative experience. Just as we found the above winery’s use of the self-guided tour to handle crowd control useful, we discovered this technique has the potential to backfire while on our visit to New Zealand wineries. When it was clear–or so she assumed–to one tasting room staff person that we were not going to be big spenders that day, our server right in the middle of our tasting poured us a glass of wine and then told us to go upstairs to look at the view so that she could take care of a larger group of people. She casually mentioned that we could come back down and resume our tasting, but by that time we were so turned off by her attitude that we just left without buying anything. Too bad since up until then we had made it a point to buy at least one or two bottles of New Zealand wine at each winery to bring back with us.
Next, remember that self-guided tours must only be used if your facility is nice to look at. Steve and I liked our experience at the winery in Estes Park, Colorado because the winemaker was such a fun character. But his tour worked best because his personality made up for the fact that his facilities were small and a bit crowded.
Again, in my experience, if done right, wineries that offer tours are more memorable. So I say give it some careful thought and analysis. Include your staff’s opinions. See if the upsides outweigh the negatives. Will you sell more wine and case club memberships if you give personalized service? How would this additional service impact your staffing? Could you put together a self-guided tour with creative touches along the way that act as incentives to buy your products? What could you do that would not cost a lot of money? How would giving tours affect your bottom line? Don’t be afraid of trying out-of-the-box ideas. These creative ideas might just be what keeps customers coming back!
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