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This study aims to offer an overview of hospitality and tourism research on artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on the industry. More specifically, this study examines hospitality and tourism AI research trends in hospitality and tourism customer service experience creation and delivery, service failure and recovery, human resources and organizational behavior. Based on the review, this study identifies the challenges and opportunities and provides directions for future studies.

A narrative synthesis approach was used to review the hospitality and tourism research on AI and its impact on various aspects of the industry.

AI and AI applications in customer service experience creation and delivery and its possible effects on employees and organizations are viewed as a double-edged sword. Although the use of AI and AI applications offers various benefits, there are also serious concerns over the ethical use of AI, the replacement of human employees by AI-powered devices, discomfort among customers and employees and trust toward AI.

The paper offers an updated holistic overview of AI and its implications in different facets of the hospitality and tourism industry. Challenges and opportunities are discussed to foster future discussions on the use of AI among scholars and industry professionals.

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.

This study investigates service excellence and hospitality perceptions in a hospital setting for an exploratory study of the familiarity of hospital administration with the topic of hospitality and service excellence. It is unique from other hospitality and service research in that it considers hospitality and service excellence as separate concepts, and specifically considers hospitality, such as service excellence, as a philosophy that may be transcend its traditional industries of origin. Part of the premise of this study explores how hospitality in a healthcare setting extends past service excellence in offering a service to a patient to create a comfortable and welcoming environment to combat patient anxiety and stress. This exploratory research provides a necessary foundation for more extensive empirical testing of the premise.

Using a qualitative case study, this research measured top management's perceptions of service excellence and hospitality within one community-based hospital located in Orlando, Florida. Three conclusions were revealed: (1) a mixed commitment by top management to concepts of service excellence and hospitality, (2) the terms “service excellence” and “hospitality” were generally discussed as though they were equivalent, and (3) significant external and internal barriers to the delivery of service excellence and hospitality in the hospital setting were identified.

The study has implications for healthcare organizations seeking to implement practices of hospitality and service management to improve overall healthcare service delivery. Additionally, the study of hospitality outside of its traditional industry boundaries may result in the generation of new improvement options/opportunities for traditional managers of hospitality businesses and organizational researchers. The study can be used as a foundation for the formulation of additional studies in the area of service excellence and hospitality applied to other layers in an organization irrespective of industry setting.

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.

This paper aims to explore the implications of integrating humanoid service robots into hospitality service encounters by evaluating two service prototypes using Softbank Robotics’ popular service robot Pepper™: to provide information (akin to a receptionist) and to facilitate order-taking (akin to a server). Drawing both studies together, the paper puts forward novel, theory-informed yet context-rooted design principles for humanoid robot adoption in hospitality service encounters.

Adopting a multiple method qualitative approach, two service prototypes are evaluated with hospitality and tourism experts (N = 30, Prototype 1) and frontline hospitality employees (N = 18, Prototype 2) using participant observation, in situ feedback, semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation.

The adoption of humanoid service robots in hospitality is influenced by the following four layers of determinants: contextual, social, interactional and psychological factors, as well as extrinsic and intrinsic drivers of adoption. These empirical findings both confirm and extend previous conceptualizations of human-robot interaction (HRI) in hospitality service.

Despite using photo-elicitation to evoke insight regarding the use of different types of service robots in hospitality, the paper mostly focuses on anthropomorphized service robots such as Pepper™.

Adopting humanoid service robots will transform hospitality operations, whereby the most routine, unpleasant tasks such as taking repeat orders or dealing with complaints may be delegated to service robots or human-robot teams.

Working with and receiving service from Pepper™ changes the service encounter from direct practical, technical considerations to more nuanced social and psychological implications, particularly around feelings of self-esteem, social pressure and social judgment.

This paper presents one of the first empirical studies on HRI in hospitality service encounters using Softbank Robotics’ Pepper™. In doing so, the paper presents a novel framework for service robot adoption rooted in first-hand user interaction as opposed to previous, theory-driven conceptualizations of behavior or empirical studies exploring behavioral intention.

The purpose of this paper is to explore an organization‐wide philosophy of hospitality in a hospital setting.

An exploratory case study method approach matched the research purpose. First, a hospitality centric philosophy (HCP) was defined from the literature review. Next, a triangulation of unstructured visits, structured visits and key informant interviews is used to further explore a HCP in one organization. After this, the hospitality centric programs (HCPr) supporting the HCP are defined, identified, described and classified.

A fairly distinct HCP viewed as a method for enhancing service excellence was in place and supported by top management. The hospital aimed to offer hospitality to patients on par with the hospitality experience offered to hotel guests. A department of hospitality services, a service excellence council, a director of service excellence, and an external hospitality advisory board were in place and met regularly. Further, many formalized HCPr had been created for the execution of the HCP.

The researchers believe that an effectively managed HCP can be modified by culture to enhance the service excellence of the patient/guest experience in hospitals and in the hospitality industry. For hospitals, further enhancements can be realized through developing and executing hospitality centric goals aligned with the performance metrics beyond traditional competition boundaries, such as a hospital seeking to deliver a service experience on par with a hotel. For more traditionally defined hospitality businesses, the extreme context of a hospital where the importance of hospitality is magnified due to treating and caring for sick guests offers a different frame of reference for learning. This new frame of reference can lead to more cutting edge ideas for refining and customizing the service design and delivery. For both hospitals and hospitality businesses, putting in place an HCP with the appropriate organizational support through HCPr allows for more precise information and thus improved service outcomes.

An HCP is defined and acknowledged as a distinct organization‐wide philosophy for enhancing service excellence that is applicable across industries. An HCP is demystified through investigating hospitality centric goals, identifying organizational support teams that solely consider HCP, and through further specifying examples of HCPr for activating the HCP. Finally, the study suggests hospitality centric service excellence (HCSE) as a higher distinction of service excellence outcome that is more likely to be achieved through a HCP.

The purpose of this study is to examine the development of service quality research in hospitality and tourism from 1984 to 2014, to identify research gaps and to suggest directions for future research.

This review comprised three steps with the first being the generation of a structural map by using the online pathfinder network (PFNET) to identify potential research themes. The second research step involved an online literature search covering 2,211 academic journal articles to obtain basic information for planning an additional content investigation concerning the research themes. The final step was to investigate the content of the articles published in top-tier journals or frequently cited ones in three different stages (1984-1993, 1994-2003 and 2004-2014) to explore potential research topics.

The study identifies 17 research themes that comprise two main research themes, seven sub-stems, six outer-leaves and two little-leaves. The developments of service quality research in each theme are explored. The role of each theme in service quality study is revealed. Finally, this study identifies research opportunities for service quality research within each theme.

This study demonstrates how to use PFNET to effectively perform a systematic literature review. By referring to previous publications reviewed in this study, researchers can contribute by extending existing theories in their further research on the seventeen themes.

This study contributes a systematic literature review method by applying an online PFNET approach, provides a well-researched list of references for researchers conducting service quality research and highlights research gaps for researchers who plan to pursue service quality research.

This paper attempts to identify the emerging themes that can shed light on the sales and marketing issues and challenges being faced by global hospitality organizations.

The paper utilizes a multi‐method approach for data collection. A thorough literature review, a focus group and personal interviews were conducted to explore the themes and construct a tentative thematic web. Publicly accessible secondary data in the form of customer reviews were drawn from world's leading web site – Tripadvisor.com. A total of 702 reviews of the customers of luxury hotels from the world's top two tourist destinations – France and USA – were analyzed, using thematic analysis. Customers' perspective is juxtaposed with industry's perspective to offer insights on the sales and marketing issues and challenges being faced by hospitality organizations globally.

Marketing challenges, namely personalization/customization of services, service management, creating a strong parent brand, under‐utilization of the social media and diverting tourists from heritage properties, are identified as some of the key emerging sales and marketing issues and challenges faced by the global hospitality industry.

Analytically identified themes in this research paper provide valuable insights on issues and challenges related to sales and marketing for the policy makers and practitioners from the hospitality industry. Findings are based on the analyses of real customer data from the world's leading tourist destinations. This makes the paper very valuable for both practitioners in the hospitality industry around the globe as well as for academic researchers working in this area.

This work is unique in nature because the authors did find any scholarly work addressing such an important issue. Use of real customer data and thematic analysis – a widely used qualitative analytic method for a scholarly study – in the hospitality field, enhances its value and contributes to the field by opening up avenues for further scholarly explorations and investigations.

This study aims to examine how hospitality consumers of different generations appraise competitive service advantage (CSA) of service providers, based on providers’ business models and value propositions, particularly, how these perceptions influence consumers’ purchase intention, subjective well-being and trust in service provider.

This study used a 3 × 4 between-within online scenario-based experimental design (business models: traditional, collaborative, shared; value propositions: innovation, marketing, service production, recovery) using equal and randomized assignment to experimental conditions. Following equal quota-based randomized sampling, three generations were examined (n = 180): baby boomers, Generation Xers and millennials. Multivariate analysis of variance and PROCESS macro were used to analyze the data.

Hospitality consumers perceived value propositions from providers with different business models inversely based on their perceptions of firms’ CSA, subjective well-being and trust. CSA amplified the outcomes and served a mediating role for purchase intention, subjective well-being and trust. Different outcomes were based on generational cohorts.

Customer perceptions of firm’s unique competitive position should be managed holistically by combining business models, value propositions and generational cohorts to ensure customers’ purchase intention, trust and subjective well-being. CSA should be communicated to customers differently based on generational membership.

This study deepens knowledge of CSA, specifically from the consumer level of analysis. The key contribution is the role of CSA as a mediator for hospitality business models and customer-related outcomes of purchase intention, subjective well-being and trust. This study brings forward consumer subjective well-being as a potential goal for hospitality firms.

Economic production analysis can provide critical perspectives on an industry’s performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factor input intensity of hospitality and related industries, namely, accommodation, food service and amusement, gaming and recreation (AFAGR), compared to other service industries.

This paper compared AFAGR with other industries categorized as services by the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The NAICS code of up to four digits was used to collect data (US Census Bureau).

Results of this paper confirm extant literature that food service is more labor-intensive than other service industries; however, this was not true of accommodation and AGR industries. Similarly, while food service industry was relatively less intermediate input intensive than other service industries, accommodation and AGR were not. There were no significant differences between hospitality and other service industries (AFAGR) in their capital intensity. Another important finding was that while accommodation had constant results to scale, AGR had increasing returns to scale and food service industry was found to have decreasing returns to scale.

This investigation only looked at the four-digit NAICS-coded industries. International differences could also be investigated in the future.

Based on theoretical arguments, high labor intensity together with low intermediate input in food service industry suggests that efficiencies could be gained in these businesses. This may also be evident by the decreasing returns to scale that this paper found for the food service industry. These comparisons could guide additional research about the causes, consequences and potential sources of improvement of efficiency of economic productivity in AFAGR. Managers in AFAGR would find it valuable to understand how they might be able to enhance economic output, particularly in the context of the role of labor. Furthermore, any changes in one economic input would have implications on other inputs and possibly on productivity.

Any future recalibration of input intensity in hospitality industries could have both social and economic consequence.

This paper enhances our understanding of how hospitality industries use economic factors of production. Labor in AFAGR is viewed as a given. This study suggests that food service industry may need to reevaluate its labor productivity, the way it is measured and how it might affect efficiencies. Such understanding could better inform the sources and causes of economic efficiencies in AFAGR industries. Until now, this understanding has mostly been based on relatively scarce comparative systematic analysis.