Comparative and lexical analysis of wine tourism websites in five different regions

Abstract

The increase in the popularity of wine across the world is reflected in the rise of wine tourism as an important niche service. Wine tour firms in this market are active users of websites in their marketing communications. We set out to investigate how wine tour companies in five different regions are using their websites to communicate persuasive and meaningful uniqueness to customer in their quest to clearly position their product offering. Text data is collected from 250 ‘About Us’ sections of websites that promote wine tourism. Lexical analysis using DICTION software shows differences by region while hierarchical clustering analysis provides support for distinctive positioning across winescapes and a link to the mean scores provided by visitors on TripAdvisor. Implications are discussed, limitations are noted and possible areas for further research are indicated.