Identifying relationships between place and experience parameters and consumer evaluations in a wine tourism context

Tourism experiences in viticultural areas tend to evoke strong positive and affective consumer reactions (Yuan et al., 2008). Ideally they lead to sentiments such as pleasure, satisfaction, nostalgia, or even emotional attachment (Gross & Brown, 2006; Hammitt, Backlund, & Bixler, 2006). Studies show that satisfaction is strongly related to attachment to a certain place (Williams & Huffman, 1986) and pleasure (Orth et al., 2011) and can lead to consumer loyalty (Dodd, 2000; Alexandris, Kouthouris & Meligdis, 2006) as well as greater spending (Moore & Graefe 1994; Dodd, 2000; Kyle, Absher & Graefe, 2003). In addition, research showed that visitors who are familiar with a region, i.e., they have visited the destination before, are more likely to develop strong attachment to that place over time (Williams, Patterson & Roggenbuck 1992). In order to analyse consumers and their wine-tourism related reactions of place and wine-tourism-experience evoked reactions and perceptions, the overarching research question of this study consequently is: Which relationships between place and experience parameters and consumer evaluations can be detected in a wine-tourism context?