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This study aims to discover factors and configurations that influence customers’ acceptance behaviors to investigate the current hospitality industry using service robots.

A mix of symmetrical and asymmetrical modeling methods was used for the data analysis. The symmetrical modeling was used to find the net effects, whereas asymmetrical modeling was adopted to find the combined configurations for hotel guests’ robot service acceptance behaviors.

The results revealed the significant effect of innovativeness, willingness to be a lighthouse customer, personal norms and concern about service robot performance on acceptance behaviors. In addition, the complex solution models using characteristics of tech-forward consumers, norms and attitude and uncertainty and concern were found.

The study shows directions to hotel marketers, to help them make customers adopt service robots.

The study explored customer service robot acceptance behaviors based on comprehensive theoretical backgrounds, including the technology acceptance model, theory of planned behavior, norm activation model and service robot acceptance model.

Tourism and hospitality employment have long faced widely recognised challenges with regard to employment, its workforce and the workplace environment, issues that have been addressed by generations of policymakers and practitioners without evident success or solution. These wicked problems are frequently characterised by inherent paradoxes and, therefore, accepting the tenets of paradox theory provides the basis for recognising the need to accept contradictions as a reality which a search for solutions will not resolve. This chapter presents six examples of wicked problems in tourism and hospitality employment, which are underpinned by paradoxes as proxies for the much wider range of intractable problems that beset policy-making and practice in this vital area of tourism and hospitality. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways in which wicked problems can be accommodated, and stakeholders can learn to understand and live with paradoxes.