Case Study: Building a Destination Strategy for the Great Southern Wine Region
Some of our favourite project work doesn’t happen at a desk — it happens in a room full of local operators who know their region better than any spreadsheet ever could.
We recently spent five days in Western Australia’s Great Southern, working on behalf of the Great Southern Wine Producers Association to develop a Wine Infused Destination Strategy. Amy and Katie ran industry consultation workshops in Denmark and Frankland River, meeting with cellar door operators, tourism businesses, and local stakeholders across all five sub-regions.
Why start with consultation, not a desk-based plan?
A destination strategy is only as good as its understanding of what’s actually on the ground — the operators, the seasonal rhythms, the existing visitor experience, and the gaps nobody’s addressed yet. Workshops let us hear directly from the people running cellar doors and tour experiences every day, rather than working purely from data and assumptions. Over the five days, that meant meetings, structured workshops, and cellar door visits across every sub-region in the Great Southern.
What comes out of a process like this
The consultation phase feeds directly into the strategy itself — audience definition, seasonal positioning, the story that ties the wine region together, and a practical roadmap the Wine Producers Association and its members can actually act on. It’s the same four-stage method we use with every destination client (Understand → Strategy → Deliver → Measure), just with the “understand” stage done properly, in person, across an entire region rather than assumed from a desk.
It’s also, honestly, one of the best parts of this work — meeting the people who make a destination worth visiting in the first place, and using what we learn from them to shape something that will genuinely help promote the region.
The Wine Infused Destination Strategy is now being finalised based on everything gathered across those five days — we’ll share more as it takes shape.
