Online Travel Agencies and Their Role in the Tourism Industry

This article aims to present the evolution of online travel agencies, the main themes, authors, and methodologies, through a systematized review. The analysis has focused on 61 papers published from 2009 until 2020. The research was limited by the journal ranking in the subject category tourism, leisure and hospitality management in the Scimago Journal and Country Rank. Field research is the most frequent in studies in the area. However, the interest in experiments and content analysis grows, using the content generated by customers in the online travel agencies. This study helps to collaborate in the authors’ decision-making regarding the methodology to be used and which authors are being negotiated in future research. The results showed how the theme has evolved, changes in approaches, the way online travel agencies report to their partners (often in a conflictual way) and customers, pointing out new trends to be studied. There was no literature review about online travel agencies published in the journals used for this research, to the best of our knowledge. Cover many years and expand the search to other academic journals is our suggestion for future research.