The role of innovation in a wine event - Buda Castle Wine Festival

An important engine of the national economy can be the tourism sector. In this sector one of the most important marketing tools that can move and motivate several wine consuming segments and crowds of people are the wine events. Although it seems to be easy to find the basic motivation of theses events, to maintain them in a long run makes huge challenges to event marketing specialists and organisers. They need detailed knowledge, creativity and innovative ideas to keep up the interest of consumers for a wine event. On the other hand wine events can support very efficiently the attraction of tourists to destinations, cities, regions and towns. In tourism strategy wine events play a crucial role to introduce wines to the domestic and foreign consumers as well. It is an effective way to improve the wine culture based consumption.

The objective of this paper is to show the importance of innovative approaches in the organisation and management of Hungary’s largest and most important wine festival and its relationship to the wine tourism of the country and Budapest as well. The paper will describe the consumers of the festival, the information channels, how satisfied the domestic and foreign visitors are, and the most important innovations of the event.

The methodological background of the paper is based on a continuous primary research work between 2004-2010 analysing more than 3700 questionnaires and secondary data between 1999 and 2003 from the Viniculture Public Benefit Company (PBC) and other secondary data from professional sources.

The main findings of the paper indicate that the case of the Budapest Wine Festival shows that innovative wine events can really affect domestic and foreign consumers and positively promote the Hungarian wine culture and products. During the last years the visitor number increased meaningfully. It can be stated that festival visitors are from all over the world by now; 3 continents and multiple countries. The Hungarian and the foreign visitors are satisfied with the festival. Many of them come back regularly to visit the festival.

Keywords: wine events, innovation, wine culture, wine tourism

JEL Classification: O 32 Management of Technological Innovation and R&D