They loved the visit. Now what? A customer journey map for wineries

In PwC’s 2025 customer experience survey, about 9 in 10 executives said customer loyalty had grown in recent years. Only 4 in 10 consumers said the same (PwC, 2025). PwC called it “the loyalty illusion,” and it describes a Saturday afternoon in a lot of tasting rooms. The flight lands, the guests are charming, someone says it’s the best visit of their trip, and the team goes home sure those people will be back.

Many of them won’t be, and the tasting room is the wrong place to look for the reason.

The short answer: A great tasting room visit creates goodwill, not a habit. Repeat orders come from what happens after the visit, and that part needs a plan of its own. A customer journey map lays out every step a visitor takes with you, from first hearing your name to ordering again and telling a friend, so your team can see where people drop away and fix those moments first.

Why don’t happy visitors come back?

Being loved and being rebought are two different results, and the gap between them is measurable. Qualtrics surveyed 23,730 consumers in 23 countries and found they gave a 4- or 5-star rating after 76% of their recent experiences. Only 69% said they were likely to buy more from the same company (Qualtrics XM Institute, 2025).

The industry breakdown in that study is where it gets uncomfortable for wine. Hotels earned the highest advocacy of all 20 industries measured (78%) and tied with supermarkets for the highest trust (79%). The highest likelihood of repurchase (82%) went to supermarkets. People adore the hotel and tell their friends about it. They rebuy from the supermarket.

A tasting room visit sits much closer to the hotel stay: a special occasion, a lovely afternoon, a story to tell. The order that pays your bills behaves like the supermarket: a routine purchase, made from home, weeks later, when nobody is pouring anything. Nothing about the first experience automatically produces the second.

Are you overestimating how loyal your visitors are?

Probably. In PwC’s survey, most executives were. That gap between executives and customers comes from 5,511 US consumers and 406 executives surveyed in 2025. The same survey found that 29% of consumers had stopped buying from a brand because of a poor experience, either online or in person. PwC’s point is that loyalty depends on the whole connected sequence of interactions, from discovery to advocacy, and not on any single great moment.

Qualtrics put it more bluntly in its 2025 trends report: “it’s dangerous to assume that existing customers will stay loyal without intentional effort to keep them” (Qualtrics, 2024).

What does it cost a winery when visitors don’t come back?

More than it used to. Across the roughly 500 wineries in Community Benchmark, tasting room visitors fell 6% in 2025 and active club members fell 10% (Terrain, March 2026). Fewer people are walking through the door, so each one who leaves and never orders again costs more.

The tasting room is also where most clubs are built: 75% of wineries source club members there (SVB, 2025). And SVB’s 2026 direct-to-consumer report found new sign-ups and cancellations now often cancel each other out. “Retention has become as important as acquisition,” it concludes, noting that customers “are less likely to remain in clubs for extended periods without ongoing engagement” (SVB, 2026).

What do the best brands outside wine do after the visit?

They treat the visit as the start of the relationship, and they build the part that comes after it on purpose.

• Starbucks runs its whole business on the second visit. Starbucks Rewards drove “nearly 60% of U.S. company-operated revenue in fiscal 2025” (Starbucks, January 2026). On March 10, 2026, the company relaunched the program with 3 levels: Green, Gold and Reserve (Starbucks, March 2026).
• Marriott has made the stay a membership. “Member stays in 2025 accounted for 75 percent of room nights in the U.S. & Canada and 68 percent globally” (Marriott, 2026).
• Warby Parker treats its stores the way a winery could treat its tasting room: its annual report calls them “efficient customer acquisition vehicles.” The company manages the journey end to end: “By overseeing the entire customer journey, we capture key insights at every touchpoint, from the initial eye exam to final frame adjustment, and from repeat purchasing to retention across customer cohorts” (Warby Parker 10-K, 2026).

The first repeat order matters most. A 2026 Bain study of consumer packaged goods brands found that new customers who earned a reward on their first purchase were 18% more likely to buy again within the next 2 quarters than customers who bought on their own (Bain & Company, 2026). The data came from Fetch Rewards, a rewards company, so read it as a direction, not a law. The direction is clear, though: the brands that win give the first-time buyer a reason to come back, before the goodwill fades.

None of these brands left the second purchase to chance. That’s the job of a customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map?

Nielsen Norman Group defines it simply: “A journey map is a visualization of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal” (NN/g). A good map has an actor (the person taking the journey), a scenario, the stages of the journey, what the person does, thinks and feels at each stage, and the opportunities you find along the way, with ownership and metrics.

It exists because of a problem every winery will recognize. NN/g again: “it is no one’s responsibility to look at the entire experience from the user’s standpoint.” The tasting room manager owns the visit. The club manager owns the club. Whoever sends the emails owns the emails. Often, nobody owns the weeks after the visit, and that’s where the order goes missing.

McKinsey found the same thing on a bigger scale. In one new-customer onboarding journey it studied, each individual touchpoint had “at least a 90 percent chance of going well. But average customer satisfaction fell almost 40 percent over the course of the entire journey” (McKinsey, 2016). Every step can look fine from inside the business while the whole trip disappoints.

One warning before you start drawing. A Forrester analyst wrote in January 2026 that “despite years of journey mapping, results are still inconsistent, slow to scale, and hard to tie to business outcomes” (Forrester, 2026). A map on a wall changes nothing. The map is useful only when it tells you what to fix, who fixes it and how you’ll know it worked.

Who should your journey map be about?

One person. NN/g’s advice is to “provide one point of view per map,” because a map drawn for “our visitors” in general ends up describing nobody in particular.

That’s where customer personas come in. We’ve used Winestories™ narrative customer personas since 2016: personas written as stories, built from real customer research, so your team can picture an actual person making actual decisions. If you have 3 personas, you’ll need 3 journey maps, because the collector who drives up from the city and the couple who found you on a weekend away don’t take the same trip.

Airbnb showed how far this can go. In 2012, the company listed “the emotional moments that comprise an Airbnb stay” and hired Pixar animator Nick Sung to produce final storyboards of the guest and host journeys (Fast Company, 2012). It’s an older example, but the principle holds: you can’t design a journey for a crowd.

What are the stages of a winery customer journey?

We map winery journeys in 6 stages. Here’s what each one looks like for a tasting room visitor:

1. Awareness. How they first heard of you: a friend, a review, a list of wineries near their hotel, a bottle at a restaurant.
2. Consideration. What they check before they book: your website, reviews, what a visit costs, whether it sounds like their kind of place.
3. Purchase. Booking the visit, and buying on the day: bottles to take home, a shipment, a club membership, or nothing.
4. Experience and service. The visit itself, and everything after it: the shipment arriving, the first bottle opened at home, the first email from you.
5. Loyalty. What makes them order again, and again: a reason, a reminder, a relationship.
6. Advocacy. When they recommend you to someone else.

It’s easy to put all the energy into stage 3, on the day of the visit. The losses show up in stages 4 and 5, after the visitor has left.

Airbnb’s storyboard makes the last stage clear. It starts with a character hearing about Airbnb at a cocktail party and ends with that character telling someone else about it at a cocktail party. Advocacy is where the next visitor’s awareness begins, so a good journey map is a loop, not a line.

How do you make an empathy map for each stage?

An empathy map is the quick sketch to use at each stage of the journey. It began as “one of XPLANE’s methods for understanding audiences” (Gamestorming), and NN/g describes it as “a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user” (NN/g).

It has 4 quadrants:

• Says: what the visitor says out loud, ideally in their exact words.
• Thinks: what’s going through their head, including what they won’t say to your staff.
• Does: what they actually do.
• Feels: their emotional state, as an adjective plus a line of context.

An empathy map is a quick exercise for a workshop wall. Winestories is the full portrait, built from research. Use your personas to decide who you’re mapping, and empathy maps to capture how that person feels at each stage. As NN/g puts it: “Always start with a 1:1 mapping (1 user/persona per empathy map).”

Don’t skip the Feels quadrant. Forrester’s 2026 CX Index found that emotional quality had the largest gain of its 3 CX quality dimensions (effectiveness, ease and emotion), up 1.4 points, and called emotion “often the strongest predictor of customer loyalty, advocacy, and retention and often the most difficult to improve” (Forrester, 2026).

How do you run a journey mapping workshop with your team?

Who’s in the room. The owner or GM, people who pour, whoever runs the club and DTC, whoever sends your emails, and whoever handles bookings. Everyone who touches the journey at any stage.

Before the day. Choose one persona. Each person talks to at least 3 customers who match it, including some who visited and never ordered again, and writes down exactly what they said.

The wall. Put the 6 stages across the top. Down the side, put one row each for what the visitor does, where they meet you (touchpoints), what they think and feel (your empathy maps), what the winery wants from that stage, who owns it and how you’d measure it.

A half-day agenda:

• 9:00 Share what you heard (45 minutes). Every customer quote goes on the wall, in the right stage.
• 9:45 Fill the map (60 minutes). Work stage by stage. Where you don’t know what the visitor does or feels, write a question mark. The question marks are findings.
• 10:45 Break.
• 11:00 Find the drop-offs (45 minutes). Where does the feeling dip? Where does nobody own the next step? Circle those moments.
• 11:45 Choose 2 or 3 to fix (45 minutes). Give each one an owner, a first test and a number to watch.

Leave with a map, but more importantly, leave with names and dates.

When should you bring in help?

When nobody on your team can stand back far enough to see the whole journey, which is normal, because each of them owns one piece of it. We run journey mapping workshops, build the maps, and stay on to help put the fixes in place and measure them. It’s part of our strategy work, or you can tell us where your customers are dropping away.

Frequently asked questions