Attraction opportunities for enotourism among international travellers to Spanish wine PDO regions

Abstract

We analyze why the impact of wine tourism in Spain lags behind France and Italy. We argue that a key factor is a lack of attraction of foreign enotourists, especially among tourists who visit a wine PDO region anyway. The international tourist profiles visiting such Spanish wine PDOs are identified and segmented with the ultimate objective of fine-tuning the gastro-touristic offer in these regions. In particular, an innovative two-step Latent Class Model (LCM) with covariates is developed. The first step concerns the sociodemographic profiles of potential international enotourists, which is therefore complementary to existing segmentations of actual enotourists. The second step uses touristic activities in order to profile the possible ways of reaching different types of tourists. The daily expenditure and the tourists' valuation are included as covariates, allowing to predict the probability of class membership, and thus to define priority target profiles for market positioning.