Robotics in Tourism and Hospitality

Abstract

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of robotics in tourism and hospitality, including the technical foundations of robotics, synthesis of academic literature, and current and potential applications. Robots may be defined as programmable, intelligent devices, with a certain degree of autonomy, mobility, and sensory capabilities, designed to perform a certain task. Distinguishing between industrial and service robots, the chapter focuses on the category of service robots that perform useful tasks for humans in the tourism and hospitality industry. The chapter begins with the review of relevant studies and addresses both engineering and social sciences perspectives. The latter is evaluated deeper by looking at conceptual and empirical research. The chapter presents applications of robots across different segments of the tourism and hospitality industry, including hotels (e.g., front desk agents, concierges, delivery robots, porters, and housekeepers), restaurants (e.g., cook assistants, hosts, wait staff, food runners, bartenders, and robots delivering food), events (e.g., guest entertainment and physical presence for virtual attendees), attractions (e.g., museums), and travel (e.g., airports, autonomous vehicles). This book chapter investigates the issues related to robot adoption by tourism and hospitality companies from two perspectives: the supply-and the demand-side. From the supply-side perspective, the chapter evaluates the economics of robotics in tourism and hospitality, presents analysis of financial and non-financial costs and benefits, discusses employee resistance towards robotic labor, and outlines considerations for designing robot-friendly facilities. From a demand-side perspective, the chapter elaborates on customer attitudes towards the use of robots by tourism and hospitality companies, humanrobot interaction, and customer willingness to pay for robot-delivered services. The chapter concludes by looking at future opportunities for robotization and research directions.

Willingness-to-pay for robot-delivered tourism and hospitality services – an exploratory study

“…By definition, a robot is an "actuated mechanism programmable in two or more axes with a degree of autonomy, moving within its environment, to perform intended tasks" (ISO, 2012), whilst a service robot is "a robot that performs useful tasks for humans or equipment excluding industrial automation applications" (ISO, 2012). Service robots in TTH provide information, clean, deliver room service in hotels, deliver food orders in restaurants, tend bars, etc (Ivanov et al, 2020a(Ivanov et al, , 2020b. TTH companies incorporate robots in their operations to control costs, to do, dirty, dull, dangerous and repetitive tasks human employees dislike (Ivanov and Webster, 2019b) and to create unique customer experiences (Tung and Au, 2018).…”

Exploring customers’ attitudes to the adoption of robots in tourism and hospitality

“…Academically, the adoption of robots has become a leading emergent research area in tourism and hospitality (Park, 2020;Tussyadiah et al, 2020). Ivanov et al (2020) argued that attitudes to robots are important in the tourism demand-side research on them. Thus, many studies have investigated their adoption (de Kervenoael et al, 2020), emphasising that positive customer attitudes are key to their use in tourism (Ivanov et al, 2020).…”

“…Ivanov et al (2020) argued that attitudes to robots are important in the tourism demand-side research on them. Thus, many studies have investigated their adoption (de Kervenoael et al, 2020), emphasising that positive customer attitudes are key to their use in tourism (Ivanov et al, 2020). However, scholars have called for further studies to explore the influencing variables of employing service robotics in tourism (de Kervenoaelet al, 2020;Tuomi et al, 2020).…”

Co-Creating New Directions for Service Robots in Hospitality and Tourism

“…Bowen and Morosan [3] state that service robots are "physically embodied artificially intelligent agents that can take actions that have effects on the physical world" (p.727). Ivanov, Webster, and Berezina [9] add that service robots are "programmable, intelligent devices, with a certain degree of autonomy, mobility, and sensory capabilities, designed to perform a certain task" (p.2) which is useful for humans. In addition, the term social robot is used to denote a type of service robot that is programmed with ability to interact and communicate with humans, and follow behavioral norms [10].…”