Customer Acceptance of Use of Artificial Intelligence in Hospitality Services: An Indian Hospitality Sector Perspective

Abstract

This research endeavour tested and validated the artificially intelligent device use acceptance (AIDUA) three-stage AI acceptance framework in the context of the Indian hospitality sector. For this purpose, data on the constructs that captured primary appraisal (i.e., social influence, hedonic motivation and anthropomorphism), secondary appraisal (i.e., performance and effort expectancy), emotion, willingness to use AI devices and objection to use AI devices were captured from 210 guests/customers from 14 luxury hotels spread across the union territory of New Delhi and the state of Chandigarh in India. Findings that emerge from this study validate the fact that customers do indeed go through three stages of decision-making process before they demonstrate their proclivity to use AI devices or exhibit objection to use AI devices. In particular, the study found that both performance and effort expectancy influenced customer emotion which, in its turn, exercised its effect on the construct of willingness to use AI devices and objection to use AI devices among hotel customers. Accordingly, drawing from the findings of this study, implications for practitioners, decision-makers, and academic researchers are discussed in the article.

Factors influencing consumers’ willingness to accept service robots: Based on online reviews of Chinese hotels

“…I called the hotel to deliver children's slippers, but the robot delivered them to the door, and the children were extremely happy. (Fujian province, anonymous) According to the sentiment analysis (Table 4), users' overall evaluation of emotional dimension's future expectation and emotional presence is relatively positive, which is consistent with the findings of Gursoy et al (2019), Lu et al (2019), andRoy et al (2020), and emotion has a positive impact on consumers' willingness to use service robots. In the future expectation, 77.95% of users have a positive evaluation of robots, and in the emotional presentation, 79.13% of users have a positive evaluation of robots.…”

“…Total (%) According to the sentiment analysis, users have a positive overall evaluation of service content design and service personnel participation in the facilitating conditions dimension (Table 6), and the facilitating conditions have a positive impact on the consumers' willingness to use service robots, which is consistent with the findings of Lu et al (2019) and Roy et al (2020). Specifically, in the service content design, 74.52% users have a positive evaluation of robots; in the service staff participation, 79.68% users have a positive evaluation of robots.…”

“…The core of hotel hospitality service is an experience that lasts for a period, and related service runs through the whole accommodation process in hotels (such as check-in, check-out, room service, etc.). The six dimensions of the service robot integration willingness scale comprehensively consider the characteristics of consumers and service robots in various hotel scenarios and have been verified by scholars in different studies (Lin et al, 2019;Roy et al, 2020), and it is robust to a certain extent.…”

“…Then, to further understand the relationship between different dimensions of the SRIW, Gursoy et al (2019) proposed a three-stage AI device use acceptance framework (AIDUA) from the cognitive appraisal theory and cognitive disorder theory. Since then, Lin et al (2019) and Roy et al (2020) have successively verified and developed the AIDUA model in different countries. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, different research perspectives have emerged, new factors are integrated into the research of service robot acceptance.…”

“…First, the conclusions of factors influencing acceptance are not uniform. For instance, some scholars found anthropomorphism negatively affects consumers’ willingness to accept robots and their experience ( Gursoy et al, 2019 ; Lu et al, 2019 ; Roy et al, 2020 ; Yu, 2020 ), while Qiu et al (2020) found anthropomorphism positively affected the rapport between users and robots and the service hospitality experience. Second, although high-range hotels introduced service robots earlier, there is no consistent conclusion on the applicability.…”