The objective of this study is to identify how digital capability affects the performance of long tail tourism marketing in marine tourism destination in Indonesia. The rapid development of internet and digital technology has led changes in demand for tourism products, which is more specific and fragmented, known as long tails phenomenon. The result is bigger demands for niche products which made popular products’ demands or short heads, tend to decrease. Some practices shown that the tendency of long tail products when combined together can even become larger than the short heads thus made long tail tourism now becomes a new revival of niche marketing. This study was conducted by distributing questionnaires to 134 yachting tourists visiting 20 marine destinations spread from east to west of Indonesia in Wonderful Sail to Indonesia Yacht Rally in 2017. It is an explanatory research using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The result shows that there is a significant effect of digital capability to long tail of tourism marketing especially on aspects of the ability to promote products in the future (tagging capability), manage big data, develop internet of things, and build digital social networking. In addition, the development of specialization, differentiated and personalized tourism destinations or specialty products is also important to ensure the success of long tail tourism marketing. Based on the result, it is important for tourism destination to gain digital capability in order to be successful in benefitting from the application of long tails tourism especially in marine tourism industry that consists of many long tails. In addition, it is highly expected that applying long tail concept for new marine tourism destinations in Indonesia could expedite the destinations creating new expertise in servicing the suitable niche market, differentiating the destinations, entering international market and gaining more income than servicing general tourists. It is also highly suggested to conduct further research on the economic, social and environmental impacts of long tails, and comparing the results with the short heads.

Key words: digital capability, niche tourism, niche marketing, long tail tourism marketing, long tail economy