For better or for worse: Shaping the hospitality industry through robotics and artificial intelligence

The application of Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Service Automation in the Egyptian Tourism and Hospitality Sector (Possibilities, Obstacles, Pros, and Cons)

“…On the one hand, the most significant pros of RAISA are increasing the quality of services provided, improving performance and productivity, promoting marketing, reducing human mistakes, overcoming some problems related to employees' mental and psychological state, and decreasing the number of hotels' employees and costs of salaries. This result is consistent with Berezina et al (2019) and Drexler et al (2019) as they confirmed that RAISA reduces errors, enable portion control and therefore cost control, work long hours, no time off, no vacation, no sick days required, decrease labor costs which account for around 33% of the total expenditures and therefore RAISA will assist in total costs reduction. Additionally, RAISA technologies are suitable for customers who do not need face-to-face or human contact, especially in the pandemic of Covid-19 and the need for social distance.…”

“…Tourism and hospitality companies adopt new RAISA technologies. They use RAISA to improve the quality of operations, increase productivity and profitability, decrease the workload of employees, lower labor costs and provide customers with high-tech entertainment and delight experiences Drexler, Lapré, & Group, 2019;Lukanova & Ilieva, 2019). The robot is an intelligent physical device with a specific level of autonomy, intelligence, interactivity, mobility, and sensory abilities that let it implement tasks and actions (Wirtz, Patterson, Kunz, Gruber, & Paluch, 2018).…”

A conceptual framework of the service delivery system design for hospitality firms in the (post-)viral world: The role of service robots

“…However, in hospitality service robots may not replace human employees to provide guest satisfaction ( Choi et al, 2019 ) because customers may expect to meet human workers for personalised and hospitable service (e.g., eye contact, warm welcomes, the sincerity of heart, comfort, and authentic smiles) ( Ariffin and Maghzi, 2012 ). In this respect, some restaurants and hotels have removed the robots from their services not only due to service failures and technical difficulties ( Drexler and Lapré, 2019 ), but also due to the very nature of hospitality and tourism industry as well, which is based on the interpersonal interactions between customers and service providers ( Lu et al, 2019 ).…”

Service robots for affective labor: a sociology of labor perspective

“…Throughout, we recognize the economic (see Ivanov and Webster 2019 ), academic (see Share and Pender 2018 ), ideological (see Brooks 2013 ) and pragmatic (see Drexler and Lapre 2019 ) momenta behind physically embodied service robots. At the same time, we insist that critical perspectives on this trend have pointed out important issues, including several related to the gender norms and identities that such robots materialize (see Schiebinger et al 2011–2018 ; Sengers 2018 ).…”