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About Vino Volo
At Vino Volo, our goal is to bring the world of wine tasting and retail wine sales to where it is most convenient for air travelers. Our innovative wine tasting restaurant and retail stores are specifically designed for passengers and our website is available to continue serving them even after they leave the airport.
Vino Volo (derived from Italian for “wine flight”) combines a boutique retail store with a stylish tasting lounge and bar, allowing guests to taste wines in a comfortable setting. Vino Volo serves great wines from across the globe by the glass or in tasting flights. All wines poured are also available for purchase by the bottle, allowing travelers to purchase wines to take with them or have shipped to their home (subject to state law).
Our Stores
Warm wood tones and comfortable leather lounge chairs welcome travelers into a sophisticated yet approachable post-security retreat in the airport terminal. Every Vino Volo location has an integrated retail area showcasing the wines being poured and offers elegant small plates to pair with the wines. Customers enjoy items such as locally-produced artisan cheeses, dry cured meats, and smoked salmon rolls wrapped around crab meat with crème fraiche. All of Vino Volo’s dishes are available for customers to enjoy in the store or packaged to carry with them onto their flight.
7-10 new stores are planned for airports in 2007. We encourage you to check our website periodically for updates on new locations.
About Taste, Inc.
Vino Volo is owned and operated by Taste, Inc., founded in 2004 and backed by industry leaders in wine, retail, and the hospitality industries. Vino Volo plans to open several dozen stores in airports across the country in the next five years. Taste, Inc. is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Taste, Inc. is led by executives with deep industry expertise. Doug Tomlinson, Taste’s CEO, has over 16 years of career success in launching and spinning off new businesses. Doug has helped several Fortune 500 clients start new businesses or divisions and has been featured as a cover author in Harvard Business Review. Ellen Bozzo, Director of Finance and Administration, has over 20 years of experience in multi-unit retail finance, including the role of Controller for Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Joe LaPanna, Regional General Manager, has over 19 years of experience in high-end restaurant and wine retail management as well as managed the expansion of two major restaurant concepts. Carla Wytmar, Director of Development & Marketing, is a 20-year veteran in the food & wine industry, having worked with Hyatt Hotels Corporation, The Walt Disney World Company and as a consultant to top chefs and wine companies across the country.
Standing behind the Vino Volo team is a group of highly-credentialed investors and advisors with over a century of combined experience in retail, hospitality and wine that include the founder of Ravenswood Winery, the founder of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker, and the CEO of Jamba Juice, among others. Each member of this group sits on a formal Advisory Board and actively consults to Vino Volo on its development and execution. “Taste, Inc. DBA Vino Volo” is the California-based legal entity behind all Vino Volo operations.
About our Team
Vino Volo prides itself on building teams dedicated to customer service and with deep expertise in wine tasting and retail. Customer service is a cornerstone of Vino Volo’s strategy, and Vino Volo invests heavily in training its talented staff to make wine approachable. A highly trained team of Wine Associates helps customers explore and enjoy Vino Volo’s wines. The company also has a patented tasting framework to ease customers through the wine discovery process. Vino Volo is redefining service in airports, recently ranking #1 in customer service among over 900 airport stores mystery shopped, and is the recipient of the Airport Revenue News 2007 Award for Highest Regard for Customer Service.
Vino Volo offers some of the best opportunities in the wine industry, including:
* Intensive training program on service and wine
* Opportunity to continuously taste and learn about wine
* Annual retreat to a wine region of the world
* Full benefits package to full-time employees
* Competitive compensation package
For More Information
Visit our stores or Contact Us. We look forward to hearing from you!
Anything that can make airline travel more enjoyable is a welcome development, so beleaguered travelers take heart: Vino Volo…the leader of upscale wine bars at airports. – Wine Enthusiast
Category: Travel
A conversation with Ed Iacobucci about the reinvention of air travel
In Free Flight, the seminal book on the forthcoming reinvention of air travel, James Fallows tells a story about Bruce Holmes, who was then the manager of NASA’s general aviation program office. For years Holmes clocked his door-to-door travel times for commercial flights, and he found that for trips shorter than 500 miles, flying was no faster than driving. The hub-and-spoke air travel system is the root of the problem, and there’s no incremental fix. The solution is to augment it with a radically new system that works more like a peer-to-peer network.
Today Bruce Holmes works for DayJet, one of the companies at the forefront of a movement to invent and deliver that radically new system. Ed Iacobucci is DayJet’s co-founder, president, and CEO, and I’m delighted to have him join me for this week’s episode of Interviews with Innovators.
I first met Ed way back in 1991 when he came to BYTE to show us the first version of Citrix, which was the product he left IBM and founded his first company to create. As we discuss in this interview, the trip he made then — from Boca Raton, Florida to Peterborough, New Hampshire — was a typically grueling experience, and it would be no different today. A long car trip to a hub airport, a multi-hop flight, another long car trip from hub airport to destination.
Midwest Airlines Overture to Northwest – Bad for Flyers?
Northwest Airlines Corp.’s planned investment in the corporate parent of Midwest Airlines came about after Midwest Chairman and CEO Timothy Hoeksema contacted his counterpart at Northwest – about one week after Midwest shareholders elected three board members nominated by rival suitor AirTran Holdings Inc.
Also, Northwest’s planned ownership stake in Oak Creek-based Midwest Air Group Inc. would be around 47%, based on its level of equity investment in the transaction.
Those facts were disclosed today in a preliminary proxy statement Midwest Air filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The document includes previously withheld details on how Midwest Air reached its sale agreement in August with TPG Capital, a Fort Worth, Texas-based private equity firm, and Northwest.
According to the statement, Hoeksema on June 22 called Doug Steenland, Northwest chairman and chief executive officer, and “discussed Northwest’s interest in exploring a possible transaction with us.”
The conversation was “following up on a call (Hoeksema) had placed in early June,” the statement said, without specifying a date.
I’ve noticed that Midwest is no longer competing for the lowest (or lower) fares to many markets from Milwaukee and Madison. Northwest is often lower, largely to compete with AirTran. It will be interesting to see how this plays out…. I assume this was one, perhaps of several reasons why Northwest would like to keep Midwest around – higher fares within their near-monopoly upper Midwest markets. Southwest may well address the upper midwest market – a boon for local flyers.
First Look at Branson / Rutan’s Space Terminal
Making private space travel possible and accessible to everyone has been a recurring topic at recent TED conferences, discussed by speakers such as Burt Rutan at TED 2006 (watch his speech), Peter Diamandis at TEDGLOBAL 2005, Richard Branson at TED 2007 and others. This week the first images of the central terminal and hangar facility at New Mexico’s future private spaceport have been released.
The 7 Wonders of the World in Full Screen VR Panoramas
Merci Pour Les Roses :)
One of my favorite recent photos, taken in the 5th – Paris.
Continental Airlines Smart Move
Continental Airlines (NYSE: CAL) today announced that it has implemented new functionality at continental.com that allows customers to change flights online as part of the company’s ongoing effort to improve the customer experience.
Customers whose flights may be impacted by disruptions, such as severe weather, now have the option of going to continental.com to change their flights in addition to contacting a Continental reservations agent or their travel agent. The new system allows Continental to make real-time updates to re-accommodation policies and recognizes when it is appropriate to waive change fees or additional fare collections.
“Customers want to be in control of their travel experience,” said Martin Hand, vice president reservations and sales resources. “This is another step toward empowering our customers with the latest technology to make changes effortlessly when the need arises.”
Smart.
A Report on GPS Navigation Systems
CNET:
Many of today’s new cars offer in-dash GPS as an option, and some offer it as standard equipment. The earliest models were CD-based, lacked detail and had a robotic voice. Nowadays, any in-dash system worth its salt is DVD-based, so maps for the entire country have more detail and Malaysian maps will usually fit onto a single disc. In-dash systems are usually more expensive than their portable counterparts, but they usually feature larger screens and integrate better with other vehicle electronics. And even when the signal is lost, the car’s sensors will keep tracking the car on the map until the signal lock is regained.
Dollar Diplomacy: How much did the Marshall Plan really matter?
Berlin Airlift Memorial at Tempelhof Airport U-Bahn Platz der Luftbrucke 52.484141 13.387412
t was “the most generous act of any people, anytime, anywhere, to another people,” its chief administrator declared. It was “among the most noble experiences in human affairs,” its representative in Europe said. It was “the most staggering and portentous experiment in the entire history of our foreign policy,” the young Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who served on its staff, wrote. Foreigners concurred. It was “like a lifeline to sinking men,” according to the British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. It “saved us from catastrophe,” a manager at Europe’s largest tire factory declared. Sixty years after Secretary of State George C. Marshall outlined the need for economic aid to stimulate European recovery, in a speech at Harvard University’s commencement on June 5, 1947, the plan named after him continues to be fondly remembered in donor and recipient countries alike. In our own time, liberal internationalists have periodically called for new Marshall Plans. After the collapse of Communism, some economists maintained that the former Soviet Union was in need of one. More recently, there has been desultory talk of Marshall Plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, and even the West Bank and Gaza. When critics lament the allegedly modest sums currently spent by the American government on foreign aid, they often draw an unfavorable contrast with the late nineteen-forties. Yet some people, at the time of its inception and since, have questioned both the Marshall Plan’s motivation and its efficacy. Was it really so altruistic? And did it really avert a calamity
Waiting for My Air Taxi
One powerful force that’s dispersing economic opportunity is of course the Interent. A decade ago there were a few lucky souls who could pull an income through a modem. Today there are lots more, and we’ve yet to see what may happen once high-bandwidth telepresence finally gets going.
But a second force for dispersion has yet to kick in at all. It is the Internetization of transportation — and specifically, of air travel. That’s where Esther Dyson comes in. She’s investing in several of the companies that are aiming to reinvent air travel in the ways described by James Fallows in his seminal book on this topic, Free Flight. In that vision of a possible future, a fleet of air taxis takes small groups of passengers directly from point to point, bypassing the dozen or so congested hubs and reactivating the thousands of small airports — some near big cities, many elsewhere.
There are two key technological enablers. First a new fleet of small planes that are lighter, faster, smarter, safer, and more fuel-efficient than the current fleet of general aviation craft with their decades-old designs.
The second enabler is the Internet’s ability to make demand visible, and to aggregate that demand. So, for example, I’m traveling today from Keene, NH to Aspen, CO. If there are a handful of fellow travelers wanting to go between those two endpoints — or between, say, 40-mile-radius circles surrounding them, which circles might contain several small airports — we’d use the Internet to rendezvous with one another and with an air taxi.