The 2.0 Marketing Strategies for Wine Tourism Destinations of Excellence

The aim of this paper is to empirically research the use of Web 2.0 applications in the communication strategies of wine tourism destinations of excellence; main attention will be focused on the integration of these tools within the “official” destination websites. The main research questions are: (1) Do wine tourism destinations of excellence worldwide make use of Web 2.0 tools in their official websites? (2) Is it possible to estimate the degree of intensity of use of such tools? The method used for the purpose of this research is inductive: starting from the observation of some specific cases we wanted to implement a scoring model that, taking into account the presence and intensity of the use of Web 2.0 tools selected by the wine tourism destinations of excellence, could be replicated in different contexts from the one analyzed here. The study reveals the interest in the tools of Web 2.0 by the institutional bodies responsible for management of destinations; however it also shows that there is not a full awareness of the scope of strategic and organizational development in the web 2.0 applications resulting in the relationship with potential visitors and those who have already experienced a tourist territory.