Wineries: more visits won't pay the bills if you don't measure margins

Wineries in Spain have spent the last few years polishing their wine tourism offer: tastings, tours, restaurants, experiences. The visits keep growing. The problem, according to Manuel Romero, CEO of Dinamiza, in Hosteltur, is that more visitors doesn't translate automatically into more profit. Wine tourism has stopped being a side activity to become a strategic business line for many wineries, and that shift demands a different way of managing it.

The advice is familiar to anyone in hotel revenue management: stop counting heads and start measuring margin per experience, direct sales and loyalty. Each tasting, each tour has its own cost structure and its own profitability. Mixing them all under a single 'visits' number hides which ones actually make money. The same logic applies to the channel: selling through OTAs or platforms eats into margin, while a direct booking engine keeps the customer and the data.

My read: this is exactly the trap hotels fell into years ago. Fill the property, celebrate the occupancy, ignore the RevPAR and the cost per acquisition. Wineries have all the pieces to skip that mistake: small capacity, high emotional connection with the visitor and a story worth paying for. The opportunity is to treat the cellar like a hotel treats its best suite, as a revenue asset, not as a marketing expense.