Present and Future Digital Media Experiences to Support Travellers’ Decision Process During Online Accommodation Booking: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

One of the key driving forces in tourism concerns the accommodation provided to travellers. When planning a trip, it is common for voyagers to search for relevant information about accommodation options through websites to decide which one to book. Despite these allowing the evaluation of decisive factors, new avenues of future research in the field are linked to immersive, interactive, and sensory-filled experiences to support travellers in making their choice, provided by emerging digital media such as virtual reality. This paper offers a comprehensive understanding of this field’s development, highlights existing gaps, and proposes paths for future research by systematizing different contributions of digital media to support travellers’ decision process during online accommodation booking. This article provides theoretical and practical contributions to outline novel approaches to empower a new era of smart tourism that enhances travellers’ experiences when searching for accommodations and increases trusting intentions. From the analysis carried out, it was concluded that academic research has only started to gain momentum since 2019 and that topics related to new media are highly relevant to the field but still on a scarce scientific development level. It was also concluded that accommodations preferentially use three technological platforms to advertise their accommodations to users, including traditional websites, mobile websites and virtual reality.