Digital and Locational Trade-offs in Tourism: Insights from Winery Engagement

Digital transformation poses a pressing challenge for firms in experiential tourism, where competitiveness depends on how digital and physical resources are configured. This study investigates trade-offs between digital maturity and locational advantage using evidence from 89 winery websites in Niagara. A feature audit coded 58 website elements across informational, transactional, and relational categories, and hierarchical clustering identified three archetypes: Niche Operators, Digital Mainstream, and Advanced Integrators. External engagement data, including Google review volume, star ratings, sentiment scores, and traffic estimates, were linked to these clusters and analyzed using one-way ANOVAs with Tukey’s HSD. Results reveal two notable dynamics: firms in weaker locations relied more heavily on digital portfolios, while digital maturity was strongly associated with engagement reach but not sentiment quality. These findings highlight how resource substitution and complementarity shape strategic configurations, contributing to debates on digital transformation in tourism and offering insights for SMEs navigating digital–physical ecosystems.