From January 31 to February 7, the Barceló Hotel Montserrat, La Beguda Baixa (Barcelona) will be held at the 2nd Annual Edition of the International Congress and Workshop on Wine Tourism. This meeting, promoted by Wine Pleasures aims to promote Spanish wine tourism to international tour operators and professionals in the sector. Of course, it also aims to help companies offering wine tourism to market their services both internationally and abroad, while also making them aware of good practices in wine tourism.
The Congress offers attendees a wide variety of presentations by speakers from Bulgaria, the United States, France, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and, of course, Spain, which take place in plenary sessions, lectures, workshops, demonstrations, debates, round tables and commercial presentations. 
In total, these 3 days offer around 40 presentations on very varied topics but all related to wine tourism. Of particular note are the plenary sessions by Kelli McCarty and Roie Edery (Celebrity Wine Review TV), Joy Neigbors (White Owl Winery), Alioscia Lombandini (Movimento Turismo del Vino), Enric Ribera (Journalist Tourism and Gastronomy), John Callely (CEO Jameson Distillery Tours), João Falcão (VINITUR) and the Spanish speakers who will present their projects in Terra Alta, La Rioja Ribera del Duero and Ribeiro.
For my part, I have the pleasure of participating as a speaker on the third day of the congress. My participation will be in the form of a conference in which I will describe the Main mistakes in online communication that companies make when trying to make themselves known through the Internet, and in particular I will analyze the communication of wine companies that carry out wine tourism. As I usually do in this type of presentation, the examples that I will offer will be in the form of good and bad practices extracted from the web pages of the attendees who, when registering, indicate the URL of their web page.
I will also participate moderating a round table in which several wineries will explain their experiences in wine tourism, the pros and cons of offering it, how they promote it and how they have managed to combine winemaking with wine tourism. I find this round table particularly interesting because in many cases it is the lack of knowledge about the necessary infrastructure and the lack of information on how to market this service that causes a large part of Spanish wineries to not take into account that wine tourism can be a good source of income, complementary and compatible with the traditional one.
The conference promises to be very interesting and I'm sure I'll learn a lot. It's a shame I won't be able to attend every day (I have school days in between), but we'll definitely see each other there on February 3rd.
If you want more information about the conference or want to register, please click here: wine tourism congress
