Broadening the Idea of Guides and Guiding: A Wine Tourism Roadmap

Wine business practitioners and wine tourists regularly acknowledge the effects and influences that guides have on wine tourism experiences. While guides—and the practice of guiding—have long been studied in the general tourism literature, wine tourism researchers have yet to fully explore the role of guides and the impact of guiding on wine tourism experiences. Although the broader study of tourism guides can inform our understanding of wine guides/guiding, there are unique dimensions of wine tourism that demand more specific examination. For example, the hedonic nature of tasting and experiencing wine in the winescape context; and educational interactions between wine guides and the wine tourist. This chapter is designed to begin to bridge this gap. We first propose a modernized guide construct by reimagining the types of guides and the practices of guiding in the twenty-first century. We then use a Customer Journey Map to describe how guides impact the wine tourism experience. We follow by showing how the various types and forms of guides and guiding interact with wine tourists for: pre-trip planning; winescape destination navigation; curation of the winescape and wine hedonic experiences; and managing retrospective memorability in the post-trip phase.