Turismo y enologíaanálisis de las potencialidades para las Islas Baleares

Abstract

The Balearic Islands are widely known as a "sun and beach" tourism destination. One of the objectives of the tourist policy of the Islands during the last decades is to reduce the seasonality of the tourist's arrivals as well as diversifying the touristic offer. This implies seeking to attract alternative tourism segments with different seasonal behavior and different profiles than the current predominant tourism, like cultural tourism. Gastronomic tourism is a key sub-segment within cultural tourism being wine tourism a very specific part of gastronomic tourism. The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to determine the potential of wine tourism in the Balearic Islands. Wine tourism has been studied since the nineties and mainstream research focus on the analysis of the offer (the wineries and their management), on the analysis of the demand (the characteristics of the visitors) or a combination of both, a situation very common in doctoral theses. This doctoral thesis reviews the wine tourism potential of the Balearic Islands, analyzes the offer based on a survey administered to 62 managers of wineries and analyzes the demand based on a sample of 200 winery visitors. Results contribute to increasing the knowledge about wine tourism and its repercussion on the Islands’ wine sector. In the Balearic Islands, wine production is not a predominant economic activity but the development of wine tourism would be a good complement to other tourism activities and segments and would contribute to enhancing the overall image of the Islands. Most of the wineries are of very recent creation and wine tourism activities go back no more than a decade. However, wine tourism proves to be important not just because it increases the wineries’ short-term income, due to the tourists’ expense during the visit to the wineries but also because it boosts the sales and exports of wine in the medium and long term. Wine tourists in the Balearics show the same profile of nationalities as traditional tourism in the Islands, but the socioeconomic profile of wine tourists is very different: they are middle-aged, with high levels of education and with medium-to-high incomes. Regarding the characteristics of the visitors to the wineries, most are couples traveling on their own and whose main source of information is the Internet. They travel for vacations during the summer months looking for the attractiveness of the climate, but they ‘go further-on’ and are seeking additional leisure experiences. Currently, wine tourism is a complementary activity but not the main motivation for the trip. Although visits to the wineries are seasonal they are distributed more homogeneously and throughout a longer period than the traditional "sun and beach” tourism. Anyway, it should be noted that the volume of visits to the wineries is equivalent to 1% of the total number of tourist visitors to the archipelago. Therefore, the ability of wine tourism to reduce the seasonality of tourism flows to the Islands is limited as long as the wine tourism component of the island’s image is not more strongly projected. Overall, it can be stated that there is a great growth potential for the wine tourism activity in the islands with important positive externalities on gastronomic tourism and the overall image of the Islands. To achieve this goal, actions should be implemented in order to liberalize, simplify and facilitate the production of wine and promote wine tourism.