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Purpose: The purpose of this chapter is to critically evaluate the implementation of technologies from the perspective of guest services, innovation and visitor experiences. The paper focuses on the value of robots, service automation and artificial intelligence in hospitality and examines their influence on service quality

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter is a critical and conceptual overview of the emergence and implementation of robots, service automation and artificial intelligence in the hospitality with an emphasis on service, service quality and guest experience. A comprehensive overview of the academic literature of customer service and guest experience is combined with industry examples from various service operations in hospitality in order to examine the implementation of RAISA in the hospitality industry from a range of academic and practical viewpoints.

Findings: The chapter argues that despite the global acceptance of technologies in service industries in general and hospitality in particular, it remains difficult to find the right balance between digital and human interactions. In the context of service quality, the implementation of robots and service automation is increasingly important for gaining a competitive advantage, but the provision of more personalized guest experiences remains controversial.

Originality/value: The study provides a comprehensive and systematic review of RAISA in a hospitality context and examine their impacts on service quality. The chapter is a critical examination of the potential of RAISA to transform the service experience and raises some fundamental questions regarding the need for RAISA, its practical implications and impact over the understanding and measurement of service quality.

This chapter examines how hospitality and tourism researchers can use ‘expressive text’ (or writing) to express the lived quality of an experience in order to ‘show what an experience is really like’ rather than ‘tell what it is like’. Expressive text refers to written language forms such as narrative, poetry and metaphor that can be used as tools in research to vividly represent the meaning and feeling conveyed in an experience. The expressive text-based approach to researching lived experience provides a textual link between experience and its expression. For this reason, it is especially useful when working with lived experience accounts of phenomenological and hermeneutic research.

The expressive text-based approach suggested here is still a relatively under explored arena within hospitality and tourism research. As a relatively under explored arena, the rich insightful knowledge that can be gained from understanding practitioner experience is rarely a central focus of scholarly writings about the workplace in hospitality and tourism contexts. However, in order to be fully appreciated as a discipline in its own right and to advance knowledge of the field, understanding the typical and significant attributes of hospitality and tourism work will be decidedly helpful.

One of the difficulties of working with lived experience accounts is finding a suitable research approach that helps to both retain the lived elements of the experience and ensure the rigour of the inquiry. An expressive text-based methodological framework that has a phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophical underpinning is argued to be suitable for this purpose. Therefore, the focus of this study is to discuss such a methodology and explain the reasons for its content, style and structure in researching lived experience. The approach that is proposed here consists of a five-tiered textually expressive methodology that is employed to contextualise, portray and interpret the lived experience meanings in order to understand the significance of the experience in relation to relevant discourses in hospitality and tourism studies, and to consider implications for policy and professional practice. The guiding questions of the five-tiered framework cover the following issues: (1) What is the context of the lived experience? (2) What is the lived experience of this practice like? (3) What is the meaning of this experience for the practitioner? (4) What is the significance of the experience in contributing to the advancement of knowledge within the field? (5) What are the implications for practice and professional development?

To illustrate uses of this methodology in research, the study here includes an example showing portrayals and interpretations of the typical and significant lived nature of hospitality reception work. This shows and communicates the full meaning of the episode, circumstances or situation. The chapter then concludes with some reflections on benefits as well as tensions in working within an expressive text-based phenomenological and hermeneutic framework.

There is an essential link between the success of hospitality organizations and the availability of appropriate labor resources, making employee attraction a critical concern for the industry. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the role of work experience, both inside and outside the hospitality industry, in shaping students’ attitudes toward hospitality careers. The study was conducted on the group of 338 undergraduates and graduates enrolled in tourism and hospitality studies in Poznan, Poland. The findings suggest that work experience displays a stronger relationship with preferred than with perceived job and organization attributes. It is also related to perceptions of hospitality career attractiveness both in the long and in the short run as well as to intentions to apply for a job after graduation. The results underline the importance of providing students with quality work experience by the hospitality industry stakeholders as it can influence future career decisions.

This chapter seeks to investigate the journey of breast and bowel cancer patients at the HMC Antoniushove. It zooms in on specific touch points and the possibilities for improvements. Furthermore, it elucidates the learning process and more particular the dissemination between the hospital (staff and medical students) and hospitality students and professionals and emphasizes that looking from different perspectives and various disciplines is beneficial for all the stakeholders involved in hospitals.

Diseases are increasingly chronic; patients are more demanding and competition between different hospitals is increasing. That is why, in addition to excellent medical treatment, excellent service (referred to here as hospitality) is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare sector, including in hospitals. What does it have to meet? What do patients appreciate, what needs to be improved and how can these improvements be designed and implemented with the involvement of both patients and hospital staff?

Medical and hospitality students collaborated in this project analysing and describing the journey of patients with breast and bowel cancer. They examined the patient journey and elucidated the touch points, which patients indicated as critical during their ‘journey’.

Most important finding resulted from the learning process of this collaboration and the insight gained, a greater awareness and understanding of the non-medical needs and wishes, i.e. hospitality, of patients. Furthermore, the mutual understanding between the evidence-based stance of thinking of medical students and hospital staff at the one side and the more on soft skills–focused attitude of hospitality students on the other hand increased.

Notwithstanding the emergence of hospitality education around the world, the hospitality industry itself has struggled to establish a talent pipeline of young ambitious managers. Typically, only 30% of hospitality students are predicted to develop their careers within the hospitality industry, while the remainder will relocate to other industries such as retail, banking and consulting. Although this manifestation has been globally documented, most studies have simply adopted a quantitative approach in defining this phenomenon; hence, despite its scale being appreciated, less attention has been paid to defining the underlying causes which drive this concern. This study contributes to this issue by interviewing 18 students at three key stages of their practical placements, namely, pre-, during and post their placement, drawing on the ‘Principles of a Sustainable HRM ROC framework’. This chapter concludes with significant findings from which some recommendations have been formulated.

Delivering services that create memorable luxury accommodation experiences rely on frontline staff to engage guests on a sensory level rather than merely a functional one. This engagement includes cognitive, emotional, relational and behavioural. Hospitality and tourism industries are people-orientated – people are needed to serve people in order to create desired experiences – and it is very difficult to create satisfaction or to revisit intention in every interaction that takes place. It is this intangible characteristic of the industries, provisions and tangible cues that play an important part in enhancing the overall luxury accommodation experience. Guests are very clear as to what they expect from luxury accommodation experiences: they feel that they are paying for a service that should be personalised, and that staff should realise what they want and need. The human interaction component and the co-creation that occurs between staff and guests is an essential dimension of the industry. The influence of these interactions on guest experiences and the delivery of services will be explored in this chapter.

The customer experience (CX) in the field of tourism and hospitality has captured new heights. The study aims to understand how CX has been studied in the tourism and hospitality field history using bibliometric analysis. A total of 188 research articles in the Web of Science (WoS) database were selected for bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer from 2008 to 2021. The citation analysis highlighted the most influential journals published in CX within the tourism and hospitality field. Bibliographic coupling along with content analysis helps to categorize intellectual structure in six clusters: (1) Customer experience in the physical environment, (2) Technology-oriented customer experience, (3) Customer experience as driver of well-being, (4) Emotional value in the consumption experience, (5) Behavioral intentions-oriented customer experience, and (6) Total customer experience. Even though bibliometric analysis has gained attraction in business research and growing trends of the experience economy, CX within the tourism and hospitality field was not yet explored comprehensively. The current study was an effort to fill this gap by examining how customer experience in the tourism and hospitality context has been evolved historically. Theoretical, social, and practical implications are presented to establish future research directions.

The main purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether hotel hospitality mediates and/or moderates the relationships between surprise experience and customer delight in the context of hotel services. This study, involving 300 Malaysian and non-Malaysian hotel guests, employs questionnaire surveys as the main data collection method. The results indicate that there is a strong and positive relationship between surprise and customer delight, and hotel hospitality mediates and also moderates the abovementioned direct relationship.

The focus of this chapter is firstly, to introduce the theoretical framework of an expressive approach that is suitable to research workers’ lived experience and secondly, to demonstrate through a practical example how this approach can be used to uncover ethical/moral concerns. In hospitality and tourism, research on ethics is still evolving; hence explorations of workers’ lived experience in search of ethical/moral concerns are limited. Perspectives of all stakeholders’ in the production and consumption of hospitality and tourism are necessary to advance knowledge in the field and strengthen the practice and pedagogy; but whilst representations of customers’ and managers’ perspectives abound that of workers are limited. Also, research approaches suitable to study lived experience are under explored. The expressive approach introduced herein draws on the philosophical tenets of phenomenology to portray the lived quality of the experience and hermeneutics to uncover its meanings and significance. This approach can textually expresses and evoke the lived quality of an experience using stories, poetry and metaphor. Its ability to evoke empathy through these media can be a powerful tool to persuade policy makers to care and attend to prevailing ethical/moral issues. The chapter begins by reviewing research into ethics in the context of hospitality and tourism practice and discussing the paucity of research representing women receptionists’ lived experiences concerning moral issues. It introduces an expressive research approach and provides a practical application of this approach in hospitality receptionists’ work. The chapter concludes by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the expressive approach.

Purpose: This paper presents a review of the current state and potential capabilities for application of robots, artificial intelligence and automated services (RAISA) in hotel companies.

Design/methodology/approach: A two-step approach was applied in this study. First, the authors make a theoretical overview of the robots, artificial intelligence and service automation (RAISA) in hotels. Second, the authors make a detailed overview of various case studies from global hotel practice.

Findings: The application of RAISA in hotel companies is examined in connection with the impact that technology has on guest experience during each of the five stages of the guest cycle: pre-arrival, arrival, stay, departure, assessment.

Research implications: Its implications can be searched with respect to future research. It deals with topics such as how different generations (guests and employees) perceive RAISA in the hotel industry and what is the attitude of guests in different categories of hotels (luxury and economy) towards the use of RAISA. It also shows what is the attitude of different types of tourists (holiday, business, health, cultural, etc.) and what kinds of robots (androids or machines) are more appropriate for different types of hotel operations.

Practical implications: The implications are related to the improvement of operations and operational management, marketing and sales, enhancement of customer experience and service innovation, training and management.

Originality/value: This book chapter complements and expands research on the role of RAISA in the hotel industry and makes some projections about the use of technologies in the future.