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Distillery Tours


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How important do you regard distillery tours to your business? How popular are they (i.e. do they tend to fill up)? Is the percentage of buyers from tours comparable to that of your regular tasting room traffic?

We have yet to offer distillery tours, and wonder what we're missing out on in terms of potential sales. Thanks for any insights.

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We are out of town so don't get a whole lot of foot traffic. People who do make the trip out are usually pretty interested in the production process. We used to charge for tours but ended up moving to free tours. What we have found is that if people are not already into a tour for $10 each and you are able to captivate them with your story, they are MUCH more likely to purchase a bottle & schwag.

We were even doing a $10 tour and with that they would get a free tasting and $5 off a purchase of $20 or more....we are driving wayyyyyy more bottle sales with the free tour....crazy.

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Tours are a small but important part of our business. We do our tours on a drop in basis and give as few as one tour to as many as 10 in a weekend. Foot traffic varies widely for us and stumpy is right, a good tour will nearly ensure bottle sales

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I like tours. And a good/interesting/fun tour will sell me a bottle.

I used to hate to hear, "Have a story."

Now I see it as a challenge. Have a story. I doesn't have to be a family, historical, heart wrenching story, but something to keep the tour audience interested while you show the process to those that want to know the process.

I won't have a tour without a tasting. I'll have a tasting without a tour for those that don't want the tour.

I also see it like the car sales approach. For most, the more time they invest in being there, the more likely they are to buy.

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Tours important. $10. By charging, we can offer internet coupon discount sales, which become good advertising medium. We are outside a major city, so it gets people to come visit us, because we have little foot traffic otherwise. More than half of tour takers buy something. Walk through full production process and taste 8 of our spirits.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'd say no on the groupon it devalues your tour and from my experience has yielded low increase in foot traffic

Must depend on your location. Groupon, Living Social, and Amazon Local (the last actually now officially defunct) all had SIGNIFICANT increase in foot traffic for us. By our estimate, provides more than half our foot traffic. But that is because we are in a location with very poor foot traffic, even though easy to get to.

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  • 1 month later...

rthsfd we walk on tours through our production process and along the way try to make the tour an engaging conversation. asking the the tour group questions

" what is the most important ingrediant in whiskey?"

What makes a whiskey a bourbon?

Whats the difference between vodka and bourbon?

Asking your groups these kinds of questions sparks conversation and increases group engagement. Typically these discussions lead to a more engaging experience for the group.

On the other hand if it is a group of people who have spent the day wine (no longer sober) tasting we bring them in get a picture of the group with the still and whiskey barrels then send them back to the tasting room

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Yea for us right now more then half of our tours are Living Social deals, and there are a lot of them. We are also a zero foot traffic area so the tour deals bring people in from far away and local, and help people find a new "place". The other benefit of living social is we have a LARGE amount of people who were gifted their tour on LS by someone else, which is a big deal I think.

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