Offer wine tasting tours, visiting three or four different wineries. You could charge $50 or more, per person for the tour. You will need a bus or van to seat about eight people for each tour.
This is such a great idea if you live near wineries. Many people love to spend the day visiting wineries and tasting the many different wines they have to offer. If you offer tours and do the driving for them, they can have a good time tasting the wines, with no worries of driving afterwards.
Check with the local wineries and set up appointments with them to bring a small group of people for a tour and wine tasting at each one. This will be good for the wineries and lucrative for you too. The wineries should welcome your visits, because you are bringing them new customers and added business. Work with the wineries to offer a discount if your tourists buy while on your tours. Some wineries charge customers to pay to taste their various wines, see if you can get them to wave this fee or at least give a good discount if they charge for tasting.
Make sure that the vehicle you choose to use for these tours has enough room to store any bottles of wine that your tourists may choose to buy while on tour with you. This is what you want your tourists to do after all. So, make sure that you offer enough storage room in your vehicle, to be able to bring back any wine they will want to buy and bring back with them.
The ride you offer on your tours should be comfortable for your customers, remember this when you decide what kind of vehicle you want to use. Remember, the more fancy the ride, the more you can charge for your tours. Your customers will be spending a lot of time in the vehicle, so if you want them to enjoy the tour more, make sure they enjoy the trip too. I once took a tour of wineries in a limousine with five other couples, then a nice meal in the city. We paid $120 a piece for the all day tours of four wineries, a drive across the Golden Gate Bridge, and the drive home after we paid for our meal in San Francisco, it was a wonderful day I remember fondly.
This is the type of tour that you can advertise in your local newspapers and phonebooks. You could also contact all of the wineries and let them know about your business and the tours you would like to set-up with them. The wineries can also let their customers know about your tour services. People prefer taking these kinds of tours because they don't have to worry about drinking and driving afterwards.
Make sure that you know all about the various wineries in your area. The more types of wines that you can include in each tour the better. Alternatively, you can offer to take a tour for a day to all the wineries offering great champagnes and just sample the different types that the wineries offer, do this with any specific popular types of wines.
If you have to travel for a few hours to get to the winery areas, you could always offer more extensive tours lasting two days in a row, staying overnight in a local hotel, motel, or bed-and-breakfast. This would obviously cost more, but could be a lot of fun to put together and enjoy. You might be surprised at how many people would love to spend a whole weekend, or two days anytime during the week, touring different wineries. What a great mini-vacation idea.
Resources:
http://www.americanlimos.org/privatetours.html
http://www.specialeventsservices.com/privatelimousine.htm
http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/index.html
July 29, 2008
