On the Role of User Interface Elements in the Hotel Booking Intention: Analyzing a Gap in State-of-The-Art Research

Hotel customers nowadays predominantly conduct their bookings via digital channels of hotels and online booking platforms such as booking.com. To gain a better understanding of influencing and decisive factors for hotel booking intention, a systematic literature review as well as a semi-structured content analysis was conducted. The review reveals that user-generated reviews and price of hotel rooms have been investigated most dominantly in the last years. In comparison to that, other factors such as hotel pictures, room descriptions, scarcity cues, brand image and other User Interface (UI) elements were not in the central focus of the research. It is found that in current research several factors that influence online hotel booking intention were investigated separately and there is a considerable lack of interconnected research into these factors. The authors identify research gaps regarding the different UI categories and propose research questions and a research agenda for future research. It can be analyzed that there are blind spots in current literature which can be covered by conducting further interconnected research in the field of online hotel booking intention or online hotel choice.