The expansion of digital infrastructure, platform-based services and online tourism consumption has reshaped the regional organization of tourism resources, yet its influence on tourism spatial distribution may vary across different stages of digital economy development. Using panel observations from 30 Chinese provinces during 2012–2022, the study builds a digital economy development index and a tourism spatial distribution index, and then applies a spatial Dubin model to identify local effects, neighboring spillovers and staged heterogeneity. Across the three digital economy groups, the tourism spatial distribution index increased from 0.521, 0.358 and 0.247 in 2012 to 0.714, 0.533 and 0.386 in 2022, showing that tourism agglomeration improved under all digital development stages. The overall effect of digital economic growth is 0.164, the spatial lag coefficient is 0.287, the direct effect is 0.172, and the indirect effect is 0.104. The findings indicate a stage-dependent mechanism: low-level regions benefit more from neighboring digital spillovers, whereas high-level regions mainly rely on local digital infrastructure, platform integration and governance capacity to strengthen tourism agglomeration.
