Abstract
Robots and artificial intelligence represent a newly emerging trend in tourism and hospitality. However, studies examining how cultural perceptions influence tourists’ experiences interacting with service robots are lacking. In response to the industrial trend, the experiential components of robot-staffed hotels are assessed in this study. A qualitative approach is adopted to compare the semantic networks of Japanese and non-Japanese tourists’ online reviews, using 1,498 reviews from nine robot-staffed hotels in Japan. The results indicate that hotel guests’ interaction with robots is one of the main experiential components in robot-staffed hotels. The semantic network analysis results demonstrate noticeable differences, with Japanese reviews demonstrating more emotional responses to human-robot interaction and non-Japanese reviews valuing the functional and technical aspects of robot-provided services more.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 717-733 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Current Issues in Tourism |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Keywords
- R-tourism
- Robot
- artificial intelligence
- human-robot interaction
- online reviews
- semantic network analysis