Pilot Study for Two Questionnaires Assessing Intentions of Use and Quality of Service of Robots in the Hotel Industry

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This paper is a pilot study for a questionnaire assessing intentions and expectations of use of robots in the hotel industry, as well as for an adaptation of the quality of service questionnaire Servqual adapted for use with robots in the hotel industry. Toward that aim, a sample of 157 hotel staff and owners in Greece completed the new 28-item intentions questionnaire and the adapted 22-item Servqual questionnaire. The factorial structure of the questionnaire was examined with the use of principal components analysis with direct obliging rotation. Intention and expectations of the use of robots in the hotel industry (Intention-Expectations of Robot Use) were comprised of six factors (convenience and advantages of use of robots in the hotel industry; staff familiarization with new technologies and auxiliary work of robots; anthropomorphic characteristics of robots; absence of concern for human position loss or role change; high cost of buying and using robots; financial improvement in hotels and robot discretion), which showed high and acceptable reliability. Quality of service of robots in the hotel industry (Servqual of Robots) was comprised of three factors (tangibles and reliability; individualized fulfillment of needs; exceptional service), which deviated from the five-factor solution for Servqual (Parasuraman et al., J Retailing 67:420–450, 1991), a finding that may be attributable to the fact that a differential factor structure may be needed to explain quality of service in the novel application of robots in the hotel industry. The three factors of Servqual also showed high reliability. Face validity and content validity were satisfactory for both scales, and there was statistically significant evidence for the concurrent validity of the two scales.KeywordsRobotsService qualityHotelsSatisfactionHotel industryIntention to useResearch methodsJEL ClassificationZ32L83M10