Distillery Tours

[Latkasimka]

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.

[Stumpy's]

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.

[captnKB]

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

[rtshfd]

Any insight on good talking points for tours? Just walk through the production process with them? Is that enough to hold attention and excitement?

[Latkasimka]

Thanks for the feedback, gents. Sounds like we'll be gearing up for some tours in the near future.

[Falling Rock]

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.

[bluestar]

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.

[Latkasimka]

Follow up to this question. We've established that tours are important/worthwhile. Has anyone used groupon to promote them? Good experience/bad experience?

[bluestar]

Yes. For the most part good.

[Latkasimka]

Thx, bluestar. Do you use some sort of online booking software to reserve spots and take payment, or is it a more manual process? And how many tours a week do you do with how many people?

[Latkasimka]

Re-reading my question, bluestar, and I sound like an fbi interrogator. Sorry. Feel free to pm me if that's preferable. We're gearing up for our annual planning session and I'm going to be pushing hard for adding tours.

[Latkasimka]

And by the way, where were you on the night of the 12th...

[captnKB]

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

[3d0g]

Wait, Groupon still exists?

[bluestar]

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.

[Mr_Whiskey]

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

[Latkasimka]

Ok, signed up with groupon for tour promotion. I'll update on how it works for us once we know.

I must say, though, we have found tours to be helpful. We're having good conversion on those visitors. Thanks for everyone's feedback on this topic.

[PA_JoeDistiller]

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.