Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots at a hotel

Abstract

Social robots are being increasingly employed in service encounters at hotels. This study explored the possibility that social robots can engage in heartwarming interactions with hotel customers. A collaboration design known as 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' , in which social robots compensate for gaps in hospitality through heartwarming interaction, was evaluated. A field test was conducted in which social robots engaged in heartwarming interaction with customers in a public area of a hotel and then collected customers' impressions of the social robots and overall service via a questionnaire and an interview. The results demonstrate social robots' potential for engaging in heartwarming interactions that enhance overall customer satisfaction through the use of the 'Continuous Hospitality with Social Robots' collaboration design. An exploratory analysis suggests that the perceived impressions of the interaction with social robots are influenced by customer gender and the duration of interactions. Furthermore, the results suggest that social robots could be utilized in other roles at hotels, namely effective advertisement through heartwarming interaction and mental support for employees who do not interact with customers.

Service robots for affective labor: a sociology of labor perspective

“…Notably, key profit-oriented service sectors, wherein attempts at robotization are already taking place, remain caught in the imaginary that certain labors are womens’ terrain (Gutierrez-Rodriguez 2014 ). These sectors include hospitality and tourism (Ivanov and Webster 2019 ; Nakanishi et al 2020 ), retail (Kamei et al 2010 ), healthcare (Metteler et al 2017 ; Broekens et al 2009 ), and education (Belpaeme et al 2015 ). Salient examples of professional social service robots already deployed in profit-oriented service sectors are the robot receptionists in the robot-staffed Henn-na hotel in Japan, the MARIO robot greeting guests in Ghent, the PEPPER robot operating as a receptionist in Hamazushi restaurants in Japan, the BOTLR robot butler in the Starwood’s Aloft, the NAO robot answering questions at Tokyo airport, and the CONNIE robot deployed as a concierge at Hilton hotels (Ivanov et al 2017 ; Yang et al 2020 ; Gardecki et al 2018 ).…”

Hotel managers’ perceptions towards the use of robots: a mixed-methods approach

“…Empirical studies on service robots in tourism are largely devoted to the demand-side perspective with an emphasis on customer attitudes towards and acceptance of robots (Ivanov et al 2018a, b;Lin et al 2019;Lu et al 2019;Stock and Merkle 2017;Tussyadiah et al 2017), customers' trust in robots (Park 2020;Tussyadiah et al 2020), tasks perceived by tourists as appropriate for robotisation (Ivanov and Webster 2019a, b). Furthermore, researchers have focused on the customer evaluation of service robots (Tussyadiah and Park 2018), the impact of language styles in the service encounter (Choi et al 2019), the effects of robotic service on guest evaluations of hotel brand experience (Chan and Tung 2019), heart-warming interaction between customers and robots (Nakanishi et al 2020), the effect of service robot attributes on customers' expected rapport building with robots (Qiu et al 2020). Empirical studies have also investigated the role of robots in the service recovery process (Ho et al 2020), the nudging effect of robots on stimulating pro-environmental behaviour of tourists (Tussyadiah and Miller 2019), tourists' perceptions about the appearance of robots (Yu 2018(Yu , 2020Yu and Ngan 2019), the impact of robot service on purchase intentions (Zhong et al 2020) and robot use intentions (de Kervenoael et al 2020), the impact of robotic chef anthropomorphism on food quality prediction (Zhu and Chang 2020).…”

“…(Collins et al 2017 ; Ivanov and Webster 2019f ; Tuomi et al 2020b ). Service robots find their ways into hotels (Lukanova and Ilieva 2019 ; Nakanishi et al 2020 ), restaurants (Berezina et al 2019 ; Lee et al 2018 ), bars (Foster et al 2013 ), drone food delivery (Hwang et al 2019 ), museums (Virto and López 2019 ), airports and other transport stations (Quan and Kubota 2017 ; Shiomi et al 2011 ). They serve as hosts and waiter staff at events as well (Ogle and Lamb 2019 ).…”

“…First, Bulgaria is an economy in transition. Much of the empirical research on service robots in tourism and hospitality so far has focused on developed economies, countries with large populations, and/or countries with traditions in robotics research and application, such as the USA (Lin et al 2019 ; Lu et al 2019 ; Park 2020 ), the UK (Tussyadiah and Miller 2019 ; Tussyadiah and Park, 2018 ), Japan (Nakanishi et al 2020 ; Shiomi et al 2011 ), Taiwan (Kuo et al 2017 ; Lee et al 2018 ), and China (Li et al 2019 ), among others, while studies on transitioning and developing economies are more scarce (Dogan and Vatan 2019 ; Ivanov et al 2018a , b ). Second, tourism plays an important role in the economy of the country—10.3% of Bulgaria’s GDP is generated by tourism (WTTC 2020 ).…”

State-Transition Modeling of Human–Robot Interaction for Easy Crowdsourced Robot Control

“…Service robots, such as reception robots, clerk robots, and nursing care robots, have become increasingly widespread, and research has been conducted on museum guide robots [ 1 , 2 ], robots for education [ 3 ], and service robots in hotels [ 4 , 5 ]. In this study, of the various communication robots, we focus on robotic salespeople in shops.…”