Does Brand Equity Matter?: How Chinese Tourists View Wine Brand Equity When Making Wine Tourism Decisions – A Case Study of European Wine Tourism From the Perspective of the Chinese Market

Introduction

Tourism is one of the world’s largest employment industries and a vital strategic sector. Tourism is even the pillar of many countries’ national economy. Tourism can be said to be a resource formed by the local unique cultural environment, natural scenery, and regional characteristics. It is the basic resources for tourism destination development. Whether a region’s resources can truly become a tourism resource is influenced by a variety of factors such as time, space, human demand preferences, and social development. After the relevant resources are discovered and developed in a specific area, they will become part of the tourism infrastructure and thus competition of a region. With the expansion of travel networks around the world, tourists are focusing on core destinations (Gao et al., 2022).

How a scenic spot stands out among many scenic spots becomes the winning condition for tourism development. In modern tourism, transportation plays an increasingly important role in providing tourism services (Nave et al., 2021). Although the COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders to many countries, reducing the flow of people, the transportation of tourists and the demand of tourists are still very relevant factors to plan for the post-Covid-19 revival (Henseler et al., 2022). The tourism market continues to rise steadily, promoting the level of economic development in regions enjoying tourism resources and restoring and improving the quality of life of local people.

Tourism has developed rapidly on both the supply and demand sides. In terms of travel demand, although the spread of COVID-19 has hindered travels, with the easing of the epidemic, people have more disposable income accumulated in recent years and an increased demand and desire for travelling. In terms of supply, all countries and regions are deeply aware of the limitation of tourism resources and have invested substantial money and manpower to develop tourism, build tourist destinations and develop tourist products. In such a tourism development environment, the competition between the international tourism industries is also more intense. How to obtain competitive advantages in the context of global tourism hypercompetition and keep the advantages in the process of development has become the focus of research.

To maintain competitive advantages and remove obstacles in development under the background of global super competition, the developers of tourism projects are more inclined to develop industries and tourism projects with sustainable development power (Nave et al., 2021). Product updates in tourism industry are relatively rare, and product updates in the tourism industry are relatively infrequent, and the speed from decision-making to implementation is slow. Most tourism consumers are foreign tourists, and there is a gap between their payment and experience.

With the low probability of tourists returning to the same area, the characteristics of the tourism products make brand building very difficult and brand loyalty hard to maintain. To improve the intention of customers to return, tourism project developers must develop a sustainable tourism economy and provide good customer service (Byrd et al., 2016). In the development of tourism, we can observe a continuous refinement of the tourism sector. From the 1990s, there is a rise of special interest tourism in the tourism industry (McKercher et al., 2005). Wine tourism belongs to special interest tourism, and designs tourism products around specific wine products with the goal to attract tourists from all over the world. Visitors visit wineries and wine regions to experience wine-related production and lifestyle, including tasting wine and food, as well as experiencing wine culture and other recreational activities.