Understanding online travel communities: a literature review and future research directions in hospitality and tourism

ABSTRACT

This study conducts a literature review and thematically synthesizes 71 OTC articles published from 2002 to 2020, primarily from the leading hospitality and tourism journals. The findings reveal four topical clusters with several topics from the existing literature and further analyze the main variables and theories used in each cluster. It also presents a comprehensive knowledge of OTC literature by providing a holistic framework based on the variables identified from the reviewed articles. The article concludes with a discussion of several key research gaps in OTC research and suggestions of topics, themes, and methodologies for future research directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Online travel community
• hospitality and tourism
• participation behaviors
• attitude and perceptions
• recommender and recommendation characteristics
• managerial strategies
• literature review
• EBSCO
• Web of Science
• Scopus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.