A study of emerging tourism features associated with Australian winery websites

This article reports on research that examined Internet adoption by Australian wineries and identified an emergent tourism focus of winery websites. The Australian wine industry has been a recent global success story and winery operators appear to have adopted the website as part of an integral strategy based on direct marketing and wine tourism. The study did not engage a laboratory-based website evaluation, but captured perceptions of winery owners and how they viewed the benefits and features of their sites. Various tourism features identified as being important by winery owners related to information about winery products, viticulture, and regional location. An important finding was the identification of competitor-to-competitor hypertext links on a notable number of winery sites—features that endeavored to promote multiwinery cellar door tourism. The study is significant in that it is one of the few academic works dealing with the relatively new and emerging global industry associated with wine touris