A southeast Asian perspective on hotel service robots: Trans diagnostic mechanics and conditional indirect effects

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated how Europeans perceive service robots, but there is a lack of empirical evidence for the same in Asians, particularly from cross-national studies with a substantial sample size. In this study, we adopt a transdiagnostic approach and analyse the disorder caused by hotel service robots (HSR) in the hotel industry using a sample of 1311 respondents from an Asian context. This approach has traditionally been used in psychiatry, and we provide a significant discovery from a Southeast Asian perspective by employing the same methodology.Through the adoption of the methodology used in this study, we recognise that prior research on hotel services has produced uncertain findings, likely due to the presence of multiple service situations. Furthermore, this study is notable because it introduces a methodology that has traditionally been utilized in psychiatry to the field of human-robot management for the first time. Two situational experiments have shown that customers have a preference for highly human-like hotel service robots (HSR), and they believe that these robots perform better in situations where they perceive a high level of control. The effects are only significant in social situations and are reversed when there is a lower perceived level of control. The study's high level of novelty arises from the fact that the effect is absent in luxury hotels within the geographic boundaries of the investigation. These results provide a new outlook on how humans and robots perceive the acceptance of HSR in the hotel industry. Professionals, academics, and hoteliers who are evaluating the decision to implement robots that could either enhance or diminish their service standards may find this study to be valuable.

Keywords

• Anthropomorphism
• Hotel service robots
• Service robot acceptance
• Performance expectation
• Perceived threat
• Southeast Asia