The hospitality industry is facing personnel challenges, including personnel shortages and high staff turnover, asking practitioners to explore service robots to enhance competitiveness. While prior academic studies have primarily relied on hypothetical or conceptual research, there remains a pressing need for real-life field studies to assess the practical impacts of service robots in hospitality. This study examines the comparative effects of human and robotic service agents at the touchpoint of information provision in a real-world hotel setting. Using a field experiment with 200 participants, where both service agents (human and robot) were simultaneously available, we assess service agent's impact on guests' experience of hospitality, satisfaction, and revisiting intentions. The findings reveal indifferent effects between human and robotic agents, challenging assumptions that robots negatively impact guest experiences. Contrary to debates suggesting that human agents are superior in hospitality roles, our results indicate that service robots can effectively complement human staff, reducing demand for frontline personnel and lowering operational costs without diminishing guest satisfaction. This study highlights the potential of integrating robotic agents into the hospitality frontline, particularly for routine tasks like information provision. We acknowledge limitations, including the focus on a single touchpoint, and call for broader research across diverse guest interactions and touchpoints. Future studies should also explore the underlying factors influencing guests' choice of service agents. These findings offer practical implications for tackling labor shortages while maintaining service quality, providing actionable insights for the hospitality industry in the context of digital transformation.@en

Traffic jams occurring on highways cause increased travel time as well as increased fuel consumption and collisions. So-called phantom traffic jams are traffic jams that do not have a clear cause, such as a merging on-ramp or an accident. Phantom traffic jams make up 50% of all traffic jams and result from instabilities in the traffic flow that are caused by human driving behavior. Automating the longitudinal vehicle motion of only 5% of all cars in the flow can dissipate phantom traffic jams. However, driving automation introduces safety issues when human drivers need to take over the control from the automation. We investigated whether phantom traffic jams can be dissolved using haptic shared control. This keeps humans in the loop and thus bypasses the problem of humans’ limited capacity to take over control, while benefiting from most advantages of automation. In an experiment with 24 participants in a driving simulator, we tested the effect of haptic shared control on the dynamics of traffic flow and compared it with manual control and full automation. We also investigated the effect of two control types on participants’ behavior during simulated silent automation failures. Results show that haptic shared control can help dissipating phantom traffic jams better than fully manual control but worse than full automation. We also found that haptic shared control reduces the occurrence of unsafe situations caused by silent automation failures compared to full automation. Our results suggest that haptic shared control can dissipate phantom traffic jams while preventing safety risks associated with full automation.

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Robotic assistance for work processes in the hospitality industry is receiving increased attention both in the hospitality industry and in academic research. Unfortunately, academic literature about hospitality robotics is currently disjointed, making it hard for hospitality professionals to decide which processes to target, and which available robotic systems would result in benefits (or limitations) for the organisation, employees or guests. Similarly, it is hard to understand what robotic functionalities need to be developed for particular processes, or what future functionalities to expect from ongoing developments in the robotics field. Researching hospitality robotics requires expertise in both fields. With this chapter, we try to give an insight in the things that should be considered when designing and evaluating the effectiveness of robots in a hospitality work environment. We do this by illustrating how robots can influence many interactions in a work environment and we present a conceptual framework for mapping these different interactions.

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