The dynamics of wine tourism adoption in Chile

The aim of this paper is to identify the key drivers of wine tourism adoption in Chile and their feedback loop structures through an extensive literature review supplemented by in-depth semistructured interviews of Chilean wine managers. We develop a model to quantitatively assess the impacts of these drivers on wine tourism adoption over time. We use a system dynamics modeling approach to simulate the effectiveness of wine adoption drivers based on data from 69 Chilean wine firms. To different degrees, five drivers affect wine tourists: word-of-mouth recommendations, product attractiveness, tourism services, information available on the internet, and tour operators’ recommendations. Tour operators and tourism services are critical drivers in increasing the number of wine tourists, but product attractiveness has a stronger influence over the long term.