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Logroño, (EFE).- Wine tourism is a booming sector, with high growth potential, but it needs greater professional qualification to guarantee its competitiveness in the coming years, experts in wine tourism gathered in La Rioja to address the status of this activity.
Institution managers, academics, consultants and professionals from wine regions in Europe, Africa and South America, along with national and international experts, have reached this conclusion at the Encounter on Talent in Wine Tourism, held on March 23 and 24 at the Rioja city of Haro, in the Qualified Designation of Origin (DOCa) Rioja.
Manuel Romero, director of Dinamiza Asesores, a leading firm in Spain in wine tourism and gastronomic tourism, who is one of the speakers at this forum, whose institutional opening is held this Friday with the assistance of the president of the La Rioja Government, explained this to EFE. Shell Andreu; and the Secretary of State for Tourism, Rosana Morillo.
This summit of experts is the prelude to the 7th World Conference on Wine Tourism of the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which will be held for the first time in Spain, in La Rioja, and one of its representatives, Isabel Oliver, will attend the meeting in Haro.
In Spain, Romero said, wine tourism “has a certain trajectory and is beginning to consolidate in many regions”, such as the DOCa Rioja, which is shared by the Riojan, Basque and Navarrese communities.
This wine region is “a great locomotive of Spanish wine tourism and is ahead of other territories or regions” in this field, but it also “costs, in many cases, a great effort to find trained professionals”, added this professor of the Master’s Degree in Gastronomic Tourism at the Basque Culinary Center, in San Sebastián (Guipúzcoa).
For experts, from the academic field, having specific studies in wine tourism “can greatly facilitate the task of finding this pool of professionals” who, in addition, once incorporated into the activity, complement their training to meet new trends of this sector, which is “changing”.
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Romero has cited the trends of sustainability and digitization, which also permeate wine tourism and which require the knowledge of its professionals to be able to carry out their activity “in the best possible way”.
The wine tourism talent, he stressed, has to know the markets well, the clients of a winery, the profiles of tourists to a region or country in order to be able to offer them the product they demand, generate a much more satisfactory experience for them and “generate customers of the wineries for life”.
And all this, he has had an impact, requires specific studies that prepare personnel with a medium-high level of training so that they can respond to the needs of this emerging market, which “is evolving at breakneck speed”, and that they can be a offer to wineries and entities that work in this area.
This need is a challenge that all world wine tourism faces, as has been exposed in this forum of experts, in which, in addition, it has been agreed on the need for the sector to have a business management component, in terms of to marketing, business and finance, to be profitable, Romero explained.
According to these experts, this task of attracting professional talent and improving the qualifications of the sector is not only for the wineries and entities in charge of coordinating wine tourism actions, but for the entire tourism industry related to the sector.
The hotel and gastronomy industry, he said, also have to improve their capacities to reach travelers who want to immerse themselves in the wine culture of each wine-growing area, since, as has been exposed in these conferences, tourism, wine and gastronomy must be stabilized within wine tourism.
Another of the aspects addressed in this Entourism Talent Meeting is the need for the sector to begin to be “more recognized and recognizable so that young people look towards it”.
At present, wine tourism is “an important source of employment, perhaps not very numerous, but with opportunities for personal and professional development”, Romero specified.
From his point of view, “a young man who comes from the world of tourism, speaks languages, has communication skills and feels trapped by the wine culture, has a guaranteed job in that sector and what he has to do is get trained to develop this activity”.
This Encounter on Talent in Wine Tourism has brought together representatives from France, Portugal, Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Georgia, South Africa and Chile; as well as different Spanish wine regions. EFE.