Robots in tourism: A research agenda for tourism economics

Abstract

The technological advances in artificial intelligence and robotics allow the massive introduction of service robots by travel, tourism and hospitality companies. While research on service robots in tourism is gaining momentum, the economic aspects of robots’ adoption have been quite neglected. This article critically evaluates the current research on the economic aspects of service robots in tourism and the implications of robots for tourism economics as a field of research in three domains: tourism supply, tourism demand and destination management. In that way, the article delves into the economics of service robots from the perspectives of the tourism companies, the tourists and the destinations as a whole. On the basis of this discussion, the article identifies various research directions and develops specific research questions related to the adoption of robots in tourism that need to be answered by future research in tourism economics.

A review of research into automation in tourism: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research Curated Collection on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Tourism

“…Tourism researchers have started showing interest in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, although their contributions are still limited to descriptions of current applications and potential future implementations and impacts (Ivanov & Webster, 2019a;2019b;2019c;Murphy, Gretzel, & Pesonen, 2019;Murphy, Hofacker, & Gretzel, 2017;Tung & Law, 2017;Yeoman & Mars, 2012). Specifically, because of the limited scope of implementation of intelligent automation in tourism and hospitality thus far, empirical studies are limited to analysis of online reviews (Tung & Au, 2018) and experiments with second-hand experience of robots (Lu, Cai, & Gursoy, 2019;Tussyadiah & Park, 2018).…”

Biosecurity, crisis management, automation technologies, and economic performance of travel, tourism and hospitality companies – a conceptual framework

“…Hence, the costs of TTH companies will increase and they would have stimuli to push prices up. If, on the other hand, technology automates partially or completely tasks that were performed by human employees before the pandemic, they have a substitution effect on labour and lead to labour costs savings (Ivanov & Webster, 2019b, 2019c, thus lower the pressure on prices. The decreased physical service capacity of TTH companies (fewer rooms available to tourists in hotels, fewer seats in restaurants / bars / trains / airplanes, fewer served passengers at airports, etc.)…”

Robotics in Tourism and Hospitality

“…At the conceptual level, for instance, Murphy et al (2017) reviewed publications on robots in tourism and formulated various directions for future research in the field. In a similar manner, Tung and Law (2017) identified research opportunities in human-robot interactions in tourism and hospitality, while Ivanov and Webster (2019f) investigated what robots mean for tourism economics research. and Collins et al (2017) reviewed the current use of robots by tourism and hospitality companies and identified suitable areas for their future adoption.…”

“…Apart from general concerns with regard to customers and what they want is what customers are willing to pay for (Ivanov and Webster 2019f). Although the data show that some services are more acceptable to customers than others to be delivered by robots (Webster and Ivanov 2019), it is still unknown what cost differentials will be acceptable to a customer, assuming that there will be perceptions of quality that may differ from human-or robot-delivered services.…”