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Teaching wine tasting online is challenging, even given the curated digital tools of the Wine and Spirit Education Trust, a highly renowned online wine certification system is used. This paper aims to initially explore wine experts’ opinions about online wine education and subsequently examine the feasibility of customizing wine appreciation lexicons for Chinese learners.

A two-study multimethod approach was adopted. Study 1, a two-stage Delphi study, was conducted with 17 wine experts representing a number of countries, using a mix of closed/open-ended questions in an online survey. Data was collected in a market study in Study 2, conducted at agricultural markets in Thailand (pilot test) and China. Dialogues with market sellers were undertaken, evoking mental imagery of wine descriptors to explore the relevance of traditional versus local aromas and flavors in describing wine.

Findings concentrate on three main areas: general advantages/disadvantages of online wine education, reactions toward asynchronous/synchronous methods of wine tasting and, finally, the feasibility of customizing a wine appreciation lexicon for Chinese learners.

The study presents novel insights into the role of online wine education in China.

This paper aims to review existing restaurant classifications within the literature in the restaurant management field. The authors discuss intra-industry ramifications of the limited use of recognized typologies and the need to prescriptively guide the description of restaurant context in the literature to communicate the internal and external validity of findings.

Restaurant categories from accepted typologies are used as keywords to collect 345 empirical studies from ten relevant journals serving the global restaurant management discipline. Content analysis of titles, abstracts and methodology sections is used to examine three propositions regarding the standardization, rationalization and efficiency of restaurant classification in imparting restaurant context in published works.

Findings show inconsistent use of existing typologies and limited use of effective restaurant descriptors to inform users about the situational context in which data were gathered or hypotheses were tested. There is a general preference for categories commonly associated with those of the National Restaurant Association.

Researchers should standardize descriptions of restaurants in manuscript titles, abstracts and methods sections, thereby enhancing integration of international research, the ability to conduct macro-level industry studies, and communication of findings to practitioners for operational use.

Recommendations are offered to optimize the use of restaurant classification so that the content of empirical studies may be more effectively accessed, digested and compared, thereby enhancing the communication of advances in the restaurant management body of knowledge to practitioners and other researchers.

The purpose of this study is to examine winery visitors’ use of information sources in making decisions regarding the choice of wineries to visit. Enrichment theory is used as a framework for determining how previous experience influences the decision on how much and what type of information individuals will use when planning a trip using wine tourism as the context for the research.

A visitor study was conducted at 23 wineries in the US Southeast. Data were collected from winery visitors using a structured self-administered questionnaire.

Results from 832 consumers indicate that an individual’s previous travel systematically influences the number and type of information sources that they will seek out when making future consumer decisions. Findings confirmed the hypothesized expectations about wine tourist information search behavior and help to partially explain the nature of bounded rationality in the case of tourists’ winery visit decisions.

Because the study focused only on winery visitors in the US Southeast, the research results may lack generalizability.

These findings can assist winery owners and destinations with wineries in their promotional efforts. Of major importance is the finding that increases in experiential knowledge from prior travel are monotonically associated with increases in the number of information sources marked to be valuable in selecting a winery. The influence of experience is particularly dramatic in that the mean number of information sources marked to be valuable moves from a low of 2.5 to a high of 10.0 out of 16 as travel experience increases.

The study contributed significant and useful findings that advance the application of enrichment theory to wine tourism. Enrichment theory does not currently differentiate between types of knowledge that enrich a consumer’s ability to more easily encode and use new information. The current study confirms that experiential knowledge is an important knowledge construct in models of bounded rationality.

The study aims to offer a general review of website evaluation, with particular application to the winery tourism field. Automated website evaluation is explored as a complementary tool in the evaluation of small and medium enterprise (SME) winery websites.

The study adopted a mixed-method investigation including a critical review of winery website evaluation literature and analysis of winery website scores generated through a free service of a commercial automated evaluation scoring system.

No standards currently exist for winery website evaluation metrics and current evaluation processes suffer from human rater bias. An automated evaluation scoring system used in the study was able to discriminate between a sample of known best practice websites and other independently formed samples representing average wineries in the USA and in North Carolina.

Wineries and other small business tourism firms can benefit by incorporating automated website evaluation and benchmarking into their internet strategies. Reported human rater limitations noted in manual evaluation may be minimized using automated rating technology. Automated evaluation system metrics tend to be updated more frequently and offer better alignment with trending consumer expectations for website design.

The current study used an automated website quality evaluation tool that serves to move winery website design efforts forward and supports the goals of reputation management for tourism businesses relying on internet marketing.

This paper aims to discuss methodological issues with the measurement of subjective wine knowledge (SWK). The current study offers deeper insights into the relationship between SWK and consumer perceptions of benefits and purchase/consumption habits.

An empirical study of US winery visitors was conducted, comprising surveys using a structured self-administered written questionnaire and trained field researchers. A sample of 734 surveys was used in subsequent exploratory and confirmatory analysis of the relationships between SWK and an array of consumer perceptions and wine consumption behaviors.

The majority of respondents were older, female, more highly educated, of the professional or executive class and possessing higher incomes. Slightly over half of the sample professed no or basic knowledge of wine and grape types or wine regions and geography. In general, respondents rated personal benefits of wine consumption higher than they did symbolic or social benefits. The level of SWK, from novice to advanced, was significantly and positively associated with the frequency of visits to wineries (experience), with wine-focused published external information sources and with a majority of perceived benefits.

The primary value of the study is to support marketing strategy by addressing the measurement of SWK. Knowledgeable consumers recognize more types of benefits, i.e. personal, symbolic and social and, thus, can more readily attest to value in a wine offering.

This exploratory paper examined consumers' use of information sources and intentions to book future travel in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors expected that general news and travel information accessed on the Internet would impact travel intentions.

Data were collected from 547 US online consumer panelists when all states were under “stay-at-home orders” in April 2020.

Differences existed in the impact of three stressors (health, personal and financial) on the use of information sources (general news and travel sources) and ultimately on booking intentions.

The lack of influence health stressors had on travel research activity raises a question for the travel industry as to critical choice of messages to be imparted during pandemic environments.

A three-factor model was used to assess the determinants of booking intentions during uncertain times. Authors applied the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to explore information searching for travel during the pandemic.

Wine is an important profit center for restaurants. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the challenges and opportunities at the nexus of wine and hospitality, with an eye on relationship building between smaller wineries and dining establishments.

The paper is essay style with acknowledgments made to extant literature, as well as US industry-based intelligence.

Primary challenges facing small wineries trying to enter the restaurant market revolve around constraints imposed by the traditional distribution system mindset, as well as pricing issues affecting procurement and markup of wine for restaurant use, limited abilities to provide sufficient inventory and the lack of time and people resources. Counterpoint discussion reveals opportunities related to increased focus on experience-based wine sales in restaurants, the importance of the story and the value of co-branding.

Partnerships with restaurants can be a delicate yet desirable part of a small winery’s strategy. The key is to develop a mutually beneficial relationship, while fulfilling the objectives and missions of both winery and restaurant. When wineries and restaurants carve out the time and invest the people resources to successfully and purposefully co-brand, optimum symmetry is formed which leads to mutually valued dining and special gastronomic experiences for the winery/restaurant partners and their customers.

In a viewpoint format, the paper outlines and discusses the key elements of relationship building between small wineries and restaurants.

This paper aims to explore a theoretical relationship among perceptions of consumer social class, the perceived legitimacy of customer requests for service and the delivery of intangible services. It focuses the discussion on service firm encounters with non-traditional consumers seeking to purchase from luxury brands.

The paper reviews the literature for current trends in strategies of luxury brands and characteristics of evolving global and Asian consumer markets for luxury and neo-luxury goods and draws a theoretic model with propositions.

Evidence suggests that service providers can improve efforts to expand services to the newly rich and trading-up neo-luxury consumer markets by focusing on the intangible elements of the service delivery system. Particular emphasis is placed on enhancing employee treatment of neo-luxury customers during service encounters by understanding the influence of employee perceptions of consumer social class and evaluations of the perceived legitimacy of customer requests for service.

The paper contributes to the theoretical discussion in luxury brand management by suggesting that employees are influenced by impressions of customer worth and other attributes when determining responses to customers during service encounters. Implications for practitioners and future research directions for academics based on the framework are presented.

The purpose of this study was to identify similarities and differences in US and Chinese subjects’ emotional responses to and perceptions of courtesy of simulated English-language communication prompts.

Data were collected through a web-based stimulus administered on US and Chinese students. Subject responses to eye contact and smile images and a set of verbal expressions were measured on ratings of emotion and courtesy.

Smiling with direct eye contact and warmed-up verbal expressions were found to elicit a higher level of emotional response and were perceived as viable server politeness cues. US and Chinese participants had similar responses to facial and verbal prompts.

This paper contributes to understanding about service employee cues, such as courtesy, that can influence service quality in a cross-cultural tourism setting.