Building Cellar Door Business through Accreditation — Victoria's Perspective

Ensuring an excellent visitor experience and meeting customer expectations is a key goal for most tourism businesses and of primary concern to government industry organisations. The Better Business Tourism Accreditation Program, underpinning a broad tourism accreditation initiative, has been implemented in Victoria across a range of tourism sectors. The program provides business management and operational guidelines for tourism businesses. Winery tourism, the process of visiting a Winery and the associated cellar door experience, is now acknowledged as an important part of regional tourism in Victoria. To assist in establishing benchmarks for cellar door operations the Victorian Wineries Tourism Council, in consultation with the industry, has developed Cellar Door sector guidelines. The program assists winery operators to identify and document cellar door operational procedures that contribute to the visitor experience. This article discusses the development of the Better Business Tourism Accreditation Program and Cellar Door sector guidelines, and feedback gained from a series of industry workshops. These workshops addressed concerns raised by participants and provided them with support in completing the accreditation program. A self‐complete questionnaire was administered at the workshops that sought to identify participant views on cellar door activity, the importance of tourism and accreditation. The results suggest that accreditation can provide a useful means of identifying and implementing business and operational practices that will improve the cellar door experience for visitors.