In the hospitality and tourism sectors, service robots have become increasingly adopted by companies to facilitate frontline service to reduce human labor, improve efficiency and provide better customer experience. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified consumers’ demand for service robots to reduce human contact. To better understand the impact of service robots in the service sector, researchers have been examining user behavior of different technologies. While prior empirical studies have mainly focused on utilitarian-based acceptance models, other perspectives, such as the interpersonal relations, have been largely overlooked. With the ubiquitous of social media, people become connected but alone, leading to negative effects on interpersonal relations.

This study discusses how firm-customer interactions impact customer engagement behaviors in the area of hospitality and tourism services. In the current study, two research questions are raised to answer: 1) what values are perceived by customers through firm-customer interactions during various service encounters? 2) how customer engagement behaviors are led by the customer perceived values? To test the proposed model, a quantitative approach is adopted. Amazon Mechanical Turk is used as data collection platform to collect responses with the aid of Qualtrics as questionnaire development tool. To reach the maximum scope of hospitality and tourism services, hotel guests, restaurant patrons, travelers, airline customers, and theme park travelers are included in the sample. This study adopts a quantitative approach to investigate the factors that contribute to the varied customer engagement behaviors (i.e. online ratings, online reviews, online blogging, and customer-to-customer interactions). Successful industry practices demonstrate that customer engagement brings many benefits and opportunities to maintain business sustainability and profitability.