The Wine Tourism Conference, in advance of its sixth annual event in 2016, is changing its name to the Wine Marketing & Tourism Conference.
Changing one’s event name could be seen as a pretty big deal. In reality, the change just reflects what the conference is already about: wine marketing and wine tourism.
In fact, in many ways the two are so entwined it is hard to separate them. Wine tourism, of course, is simply the visitation of wine regions by travelers. From an industry conference perspective, our goal has always been to provide valuable advice on how to grow and improve one’s own wine tourism offering. And growing wine tourism is all about effective marketing.
And so wine marketing has been a key component of the conference since the beginning. This past November, for example, we had content on digital marketing, no-cost guerrilla marketing, promoting your wine tourism business beyond your region, email marketing, and more.
We do think wine tourism is a special component of the wine industry. Selling out the cellar door is a hugely important revenue stream for many, many wineries and focusing on tourism is a critical way to grow that revenue stream. So we will continue to offer lots of content focused on wine tourism but will also continue to provide what we think is top-notch marketing content specific to the wine industry.