Europe’s drinks trade bodies launch local tourism campaigns

The Austrian Wine Marketing Board has gone ahead with its tourism campaign for 2020, highlighting vineyards for domestic tourists to visit.

Austrian Wine has created a new website, called All Aboard for Wine, which lists prominent wineries and their oenotourism offers in an effort to ensure stay-cationers make up for the loss of footfall caused by coronavirus travel restrictions.

The UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) currently advises against all but essential travel to Austria, people returning from the country after 22 August are being asked to self isolate.

Due to ever-changing quarantine requirements across Europe, many tourism boards have turned their focus to attracting local visitors to areas of natural beauty and key attractions. In the UK, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association published a virtual distillery map to encourage Brits to visit local drinks companies and boost the industry’s own tourism sector.

According to the Gallup Institute, around 60% of Austrians who want to get away this summer plan to holiday in their own country.

The Austrian Tourism Office also carried out its own research, discovering that around 30% of Austrian tourists are interested in food and drink, but 4-5% could be defined as “epicurean” (i.e., would go out of their way to shape their holiday around local cuisine and wine). Despite being just a small proportion of tourists as a whole, so-called epicureans apparently spend 50% more on holiday than any other group, making them a very valuable target audience.

Austrian Wine’s website showcases 1,800 estates with their various programmes , including opening dates, accommodation options, and cellar door sales, as well as dedicated wine events across key winegrowing regions.

These range from open cellars to vineyard hikes, cycle trails and picnics, to cultural events such as open air concerts. Winery operators are being encouraged to list whatever plans they have for the summer on the website themselves.

The Austrian wine body will promote these events and offers through a number of local channels including online and print media, radio and TV advertisements.