Chateau Mukrani is a leading wine producer in Georgia. At the winery, the Chateau is renovating a historical castle of a Georgian royal family and turning it into a high-standard event center and wine-tourism destination.

As part of its planning and capital expenditure budgeting processes the Chateau needed a credible estimate of demand for various services that might be offered at the renovated castle such as wine tours and business meetings.

TBSC was retained to collect needed data and then make a credible demand forecast that could be presented to the Board. We first designed a demand forecast model that needed to be filled with market data; this provided a list of data that we needed to obtain from a number of sources. We then interviewed many people on the supply side of services (e.g., hotels, event management companies, tour companies) and Government.

Based on the data list and comments from the supply side we designed survey instruments to use with the demand side. Our sub-contractor, ACT, then did a near-census of companies, international organizations, diplomatic missions and others that order services that might be held at the Chateau. In particular we wished to understand the quantity of demand for different services, the features needed for each service and the factors buyers use when choosing venues.

The detailed data was put into the demand forecast model and estimates of the actual business that the Chateau will have was estimated. Different scenarios were tested to arrive at our final estimates of quantity. Prices were then added to forecast overall revenue. Results were presented in a number of discussion documents that will be provided directly to the Chateau’s Board as they consider various planning and budgeting options.

We came up with several interesting findings through analysis of the market data. For instance, we discovered number of events organized by private and international organizations in Georgia per year, most of them held at main hotel chains of Tbilisi. At the same time, we made census of exclusive and luxury event venues in Georgia. Observations about wine tourism included interest of foreign visitors in wine culture of Georgia and supply of wine tour packages in Georgia.

We also made a number of recommendations on how the Chateau should manage the creation and rollout of different services. The Chateau began implementing some of our recommendations immediately after our final meeting.