The Digital Tourism Business: A Systematic Review of Essential Digital Marketing Strategies and Trends

Introduction

In recent years, the development of new technologies and, in particular, the Internet, has encouraged industries such as tourism to adapt their business models to the 21^st century and to the new forms of marketing (Bennett et al., 2017). With the development of these new technologies, marketing has evolved towards a digital ecosystem in which products and services can be obtained 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the world (Sutherland et al., 2018).

Traditional marketing has evolved to consolidate certain digital marketing strategies that are operating with very high percentages of returns and that are driven by the time users spend using their mobile phones and computers (Palos-Sanchez et al., 2019).

This evolution of new technologies has caused users to change their behavior and habits spending more time connected to the Internet (Yousaf & Xiucheng, 2018). This fact represents an opportunity for companies and industries that can operate in these digital ecosystems, since different research indicates that users invest an average of 6 hours a day in front of digital screens (Fang et al., 2016)

In this sense, we must point out that certain industries such as the tourism industry have also joined this trend and have opted for business models based on the digital environment, which has led to an authentic revolution in the sector. This revolution has caused companies to focus their main marketing strategies on what is known as Digital Tourism Business (DTB). Basically, the DTB is defined as the businesses that are related to tourism and that their main sales channel is the Internet, and also, the strategies to boost their business models are based on digital marketing techniques (Hojeghan & Esfangareh, 2011).

The industry in which this research study is focused is the one related to tourism, a sector that is increasingly global and in which more tourists increase their investment. The tourism industry relies on sales through the Internet in terms of business such as the sale of airline tickets, or personalized travel packages, as well as last minute offers and low-cost travel organization (Nezakati et al., 2015; Palos-Sanchez & Saura, 2018).

The ease offered by the Internet to show information related to tourism has made many companies to choose digital marketing as the main digital marketing development strategy to achieve sales through the Internet (Sutherland et al., 2018).

Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a Systematic Review of Literature (SRL) on the main published research in the field of DTB in order to define what are the essential strategies of digital marketing that should be develop the companies with tourist purposes that perform on the Internet (Li et al., 2018). This fact is important due mainly to the importance that the companies that perform on the Internet within the tourism sector develop their business models based on digital strategies (Saura, Rodríguez & Reye-Menendez, 2019; Tavakoli et al., 2019). It is important to correctly choose the digital marketing tactics and strategies to be able to hit the users that follow a brand, and in this way, to be able to optimize the strategies in the digital environment (Senyo et al., 2019).