PLANNING SUSTAINABLE WINE TOURISM IN TANZANIA: AN EXPERT-WEIGHTED VALUE CHAIN APPROACH

Wine tourism is increasingly recognised as a strategic pathway for diversifying rural economies and enhancing destination competitiveness; however, its development in emerging destinations remains weakly structured and under-researched. This study examines how wine tourism in Tanzania can be planned as a sustainable and integrated value chain. Drawing on Institutional Theory and Experience Economy Theory, the study adopts a quantitative, expert-based research design using Real-Time Delphi, Analytic Hierarchy Process, and a Weighted Scoring Method. Primary data were collected from 46 experts representing key actors across the wine tourism value chain, including production, tourism services, markets, and governance. The analysis identifies and ranks the relative importance of value chain components for sustainable wine tourism development. The findings reveal that institutional, regulatory, and policy support, followed by marketing and branding and wine tourism experiences, are perceived as the most critical drivers, outweighing production-focused factors. It therefore indicates that sustainable wine tourism in emerging contexts is shaped more by governance quality and experiential design than by wine production alone. The study contributes to theory by integrating institutional and experiential perspectives within an expert-weighted value chain framework, and to practice by offering evidence-based guidance for policymakers, planners, and industry stakeholders seeking to develop sustainable wine tourism in Tanzania.