Based in Adelaide our brands Taste the Barossa, Taste the McLaren, and See Adelaide and Beyond offer a fabulous range of day touring options. Our guests love our tours, our itineraries, our tour guides, and our service. How do we know this? Because our tours continue to attract fabulous reviews and feedback with over 1500 5-star excellent reviews between Trip Advisor and Google!!

 

The Covid-19 Pandemic has been an un-nerving and worrying time for people from every walk of life, and every one of us has been affected in some way shape or form. Tourism and travel has of course been massively affected, with many people having to cancel their longed-for travel plans due to uncertainty and International and Domestic border closures.

 

Following the closures and uncertainty around travel, we at Taste the Barossa and See Adelaide and Beyond understood the necessity to maintain outstanding quality and service by ensuring that all our guests who held future bookings with us were refunded quickly. We recognised that having to cancel plans is hard enough without then being made to wait for refunds.

 

How have we prepared for a Covid-safe return on our Small Group Wine Tours?

 

Covid-19 has impacted our business too and this has meant a period of closure for us. While we have been un-able to operate our tours, we have been busily readying ourselves to come back bigger and better. Part of this process has been to ensure that when we re-open for business the travel experience with Taste the Barossa, Taste the McLaren, and See Adelaide and Beyond is Covid-Safe.

 

 

We have introduced more stringent cleaning procedures, with all our vehicles receiving thorough internal cleaning following each day tour. Our tour buses are also now fitted with hand sanitizing stations helping our guests maintain hand hygiene recommendations. We have also been working closely with our Winery Cellar Door partners to ensure that all our guests have a fabulously enjoyable experience whilst also being able to adhere to Covid-19 rules keeping everyone Covid-safe.

 

Welcome back to our Interstate guests

From the 20th July 2020 South Australia will be re-opening Domestic Borders. This news is hugely exciting as we will be able to welcome our Interstate guests back onboard our small group tours for fabulous sightseeing and wine tasting experiences. Jump on our website and book your tour now!

 

Why not consider our Private touring options!

With our array of touring vehicles, specialist knowledge, and fantastic team of Tour Guides we also offer fabulous private touring options. For groups of between 2-20 people, we can build the perfect itinerary to cater to your every wish. What better way to re-connect with friends and family after the last few months!

 

Contact Us

Visit our websites to book (vouchers available) or call 08 83571594 and have a chat with our friendly office staff who are ready to answer your questions. We hope to see you soon!

We at Taste the Barossa happily pay the appropriate commissions to travel agents that sell our tours and rightly earn that commission. We are proudly featured in wholesale, inbound and retail brochures world-wide and value those relationships we have built over the past 20+ years we have been in the tourism industry.

We have serious issues however with the relatively new practice here in Adelaide of some City hotels, who in partnership with an online agent are charging us 20% commission when a customer chooses our brochure from the brochure rack and takes it to the hotel concierge in order to book our tour.

To be clear, we’ve already paid for our brochures and we also pay a substantial monthly fee to be in the brochure racks. How can 20% commission (shared between the hotel and an online agent) possibly be justified simply for a phone call?

When this first happened we reluctantly agreed to a 20% commission rate. However, after literally no bookings from a hotel we previously had many bookings from, I called the agent to query the issue. I was told that we weren’t competitive enough. Not really understanding the answer I argued that we were ranked #1 on TripAdvisor for the previous 8 years and remained without a doubt the most popular and positively reviewed tour company in Adelaide. Knowing the company they were selling, I was confident we had the superior product. Unfortunately, when they said we weren’t competitive enough it wasn’t the quality of our product it was the level of our commission rate, the other company was paying 25% commission.

We were told if we wanted sales we’d have to increase our commission. We knew customers were picking up our brochure and being sold another product purely on the basis of a higher commission. This is a very slippery slope!

This simply isn’t sustainable in the medium to long term, positive word of mouth from customers is imperative.  We can’t be diluting the quality of our customers experience simply to add a small income to the bottom line of huge hotel chains. This is even more important in a market like Adelaide where we have to trade on the quality of the experience rather than a well-known iconic attraction.

Last year Taste the Barossa chose to stop paying any commission of any type to local hotels and instead have partnered with the Little Hero’s Foundation. We now donate 10% of all bookings made by hotel staff directly to The Little Hero’s Foundation. To date we have donated over $6,000 to this local South Australian Charity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay tuned for our new Taste the Barossa initiative to raise much needed funds for the Little Hero’s Foundation. We are very excited.

This is our way of pushing back.