Wineries can now offer Zoom or Group Virtual Wine Tastings, Instantly
San Francisco, CA
CellarPass, the leading reservations and ticketing platform for the alcohol industry, has announced the seamless integration of their reservations system with Zoom Meetings.
When COVID-19 hit the wine industry in mid-March, governors across the United States quickly ordered “shelter in place” mandates shuttering thousands of tasting rooms which were labeled as non-essential overnight. The majority of wineries and tasting rooms are small businesses, this created chaos for their owners and employees as it quickly cut off their ability to host guests onsite for tours, tastings and their major revenue channel, direct-to-consumer sales.
Though many tasting room owners and managers thought that this situation would only last a few weeks, many small to medium-sized wineries and tasting rooms who solely relying on tourism simply could not accept the idea of shutting their business indefinitely. They had to focus on what they could do, less on what they could not do. Equally effected was CellarPass, which is the largest guest management platform used by wineries and tasting rooms to market and promote visitation.
Enter the world of virtual wine tastings, a sales and communication channel that they could offer. CellarPass had already proven a lot of success with virtual tastings a few years ago with their popular weekly CellarPassTV show that ran for over 3 years. As the Shelter in Place (SIP) orders quickly grew, CellarPass saw this as an opportunity to innovate by solving some of the logistical challenges that virtual tastings create, one being human resource planning and the other to attract and engage online audiences for the brands to promote their virtual tastings to. Within days CellarPass completed major updates to their platform to not only manage virtual tastings, but to also safely manage curbside pickups, which became a huge success for tasting rooms overnight.
Today, CellarPass manages and markets thousands of virtual tastings every week and today’s announcement with Zoom Meetings allows wineries to quickly scale up their offerings while reducing the mundane and duplicate tasks of creating and managing their Zoom calendar. Additional features allow virtual hosts to offer group tastings or one-one-one meetings in just a few keystrokes. When reservations are booked, guests can be automatically added to existing Zoom meetings or offered their own private sessions without any further steps, saving valuable time for many wineries that are already short-staffed due to COVID-19.
“Within the first few days of Shelter in Place mandates lighting up across the U.S., we wanted to stay ahead of this as we knew this could be the end for many of our smaller clients- their lifeblood is hosting guests in their tasting rooms, who ultimately buy wines during their visit”, says Jonathan Elliman, CellarPass co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. “In just a couple of days, we quickly adapted our platform to manage and promote curbside pickups a few days later we added support for virtual tastings”, continues Elliman. “And to allow customization for one-on-one virtual tastings, we’ve built-in the flexibility for our clients to leverage our ticketing or our reservation features for their virtual tastings, from scheduling to communicating how attendees join their Zoom meeting”, says Elliman.
CellarPass’ integration with the Zoom Meeting platform eliminates the need to create and manage meetings in Zoom, altogether as this is done for you at the time the reservation is booked. Reservation times can be setup to automatically generate a Zoom meeting and add registered attendees, whether private or shared with other meeting attendees, providing a clear workflow and communication to attendees on when and how to join their booked virtual tasting.
Any CellarPass Professional subscriber (or higher) can begin using the CellarPass Zoom Meeting integration with no additional fees. Those on lesser plans are encouraged to upgrade their subscription to save time and frustration when managing your virtual tastings.
About CellarPass
Celebrating 11 years, CellarPass is the leading real-time guest management platform designed for the alcohol industry that offers visitors an easy way to buy tickets and book reservations, online or through a mobile-friendly website. Headquartered in San Francisco, with local offices in Paso Robles, Seattle and Napa Valley, CellarPass offers enterprise-level guest management platform for wineries, breweries and distilleries that enhances the visitor experience while building long-lasting relationships. For more information about CellarPass, visit www.cellarpass.com. Follow CellarPass on Instagram at instagram.com/cellarpass, Facebook at facebook.com/cellarpass and Twitter at twitter.com/cellarpass to read the latest announcements.
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