Guest Editorial

ABSTRACT

[...]there is an increasing interest in implementing automated forms of interaction in services (Paluch et al., 2020;Flavián et al., 2021), and this trend is not different in the tourism, leisure and hospitality industry. [...]this study contributes to previous literature by comparing traditional and mascot-like appearances of service robots and identifies sense of humor as a key anthropomorphized personality trait of service robots. [...]some demographic characteristics (sex, age, education and income) as well as attitude, expectations or travel frequency are found to be key determinants of willingness to pay. [...]results suggest interesting implications for the tourism and hospitality industry, helping to identify those customers more interested in service robots and suggesting some directions in which companies need to work to successfully implement service robots. [...]the study “Customers’ Evaluation of mechanical Artificial Intelligence in Hospitality Services A Study using Online Reviews Analytics,” by Mariani and Borghi (2021), analyzes if the presence of mechanical AI-related text in online reviews influences customers’ online review valence across 19 leading international hotels that have integrated mechanical AI.