Service quality at the cellar door: implications for Western Australia’s developing wine tourism industry

Abstract

Wine tourism has emerged as a growing area of special interest tourism in Australia, and is an increasingly significant component of the regional and rural tourism product of Western Australia. The increased significance and growing competitiveness of this sector has led to a heightened concern by producers and consumers for the quality of services being offered, and has forced many within the industry to invest in the delivery of higher levels of service quality as a means to achieving competitive differentiation. An integral part of any organisation’s attempt to deliver on this front is a commitment to a process of continuous quality improvement. This requires a systematic approach to quality measurement. Investigates the conceptualisation and measurement of service quality and its importance to the wine tourism industry and reports the findings from a recently‐conducted survey of cellar door customers at four Western Australian wineries. Demonstrates the relative usefulness of the importance/performance methodology for cellar door operators in highlighting how wineries are performing from a customer point of view, and also what is important in terms of performance from the customers’ point of view.

Citation

O’Neill, M. and Charters, S. (2000), "Service quality at the cellar door: implications for Western Australia’s developing wine tourism industry", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 112-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/09604520010318308