What are you looking at? Visual attention during the co-created cellar door experience: customer and staff perspectives from Australian experiences

Purpose The prevalence of visually splendid multi-million-dollar cellar doors (CDs) builds an assumption that bricks and mortar create the co-created cellar door experience (CDE). This study aims to determine what attracts the visual attention of staff and customers during a CDE at three visual designs of CD: lively, stylised and simple. Design/methodology/approach A total of 23 customers and five staff consented to record their CDEs using TobiiPro2 glasses with 35 recordings providing 993 min for analysis with Tobii Pro Lab. Twenty-five areas of interest were used to calculate fixation and visit metrics. Findings The most attended elements of a co-created CDE were staff and faces. Attention is less influenced by the design of CD, whereas staff significantly influence attention. Research limitations/implications The findings are valuable to the industry as they highlight the importance of human resources to a winery business, an increasingly casualised workforce. Future research could focus on staffing needs, including training and performance during experience delivery, with the expectation of increasing profitability. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to analyse objective recordings of staff and customer visual attention during their experience.