An empirical investigation of tourist’s choice of service delivery options: SSTs vs service employees
International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management
ISSN: 0959-6119
Article publication date: 10 July 2017
Issue publication date: 10 July 2017
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to offer and examine a conceptual model of tourist innovativeness toward self-service technologies (SSTs) to confirm whether tourists prefer service delivery by SSTs over employees in an offline hospitality environment.
Design/methodology/approach
Tourists’ perceived usefulness (PU) of SSTs and need for interaction (NI) with service employees have been taken as crucial mediating variables to examine the effects of perceived ease of use and technology readiness index personality dimensions toward SST and employee-based service adoption.
Findings
Findings reveal that both “NI” and “PU” play significant roles in Technology Readiness and Acceptance Model (TRAM) when tourists select one of two service delivery options – SSTs and service employees.
Research limitations/implications
The foremost limitation of the study is its dependence on domestic tourist samples. However, such samples were chosen because tourists comprising these samples tend to use similar service delivery options more, in turn increasing their use of SSTs available in sample hotels.
Practical implications
The study gives a deeper understanding of TRAM with an extremely crucial mediating variable (NI) in an offline service context. It also provides useful insights to service providers and policy makers for developing new strategies and policies to enhance user experience.
Social implications
This study recommends the usage of numerous SSTs by tourists.
Originality/value
During extensive literature review carried out in this research, no study was found that proposed such an effective framework in an offline service context.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Authors would like to give their sincere regards to all the hotel owners and managers apart from public transport service providers for lending their unconditional support in data collection. They are also thankful to all their respondents who have participated in their survey.
Retraction notice: The publishers of International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, wish to retract the article Kaushik, A.K. and Rahman, Z. (2017), “An empirical investigation of tourist’s choice of service delivery options: SSTs vs service employees”, published in International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 1892-1913.
An investigation was launched following an allegation made about the originality of the article. The authors have fully cooperated with this investigation and, upon request, supplied the part of the dataset used in the research for review. Using this dataset, the editorial team were unable to replicate the results included in the article, and as a result, the decision was made to retract the article.
As part of the investigation, it was noted that the article contains similarities to the authors’ own previous work:
Kaushik, A.K., Agrawal, A.K. and Rahman, Z. (2015), “Tourist behaviour towards self-service hotel technology adoption: trust and subjective norm as key antecedents”, Tourism Management Perspectives, Vol. 16, pp. 278-289.
The journal sincerely apologises to its readers.
Citation
Kaushik, A.K. and Rahman, Z. (2017), "An empirical investigation of tourist’s choice of service delivery options: SSTs vs service employees", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 29 No. 7, pp. 1892-1913. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-08-2015-0438
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited