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.

Since the impact of COVID-19, the tourism and hospitality (T&H) practitioners have become increasingly aware of the crucial role of technology. The metaverse, which combines multiple emerging technologies, has become a hot topic that can take customers' experience in T&H to the next level. Previous research has already indicated that industrial practitioners should begin to consider business transformation to face the era of the metaverse. The metaverse is a continuum from the digital worlds to the physical worlds, with the convergence of physical and virtual worlds in the middle. Digital worlds include mirror worlds that simulate and reflect the real world and the virtual native, an innovative digital world. The digital twin has been mentioned as being created for destinations, hotels, and resorts, relying on the internet of things (IoT) as a crucial component of metaverse technology. However, previous studies have rarely explored the role of the IoT in the metaverse, particularly for T&H customers' metaverse experience. Therefore, this study aims to explore the role of the IoT in customers' metaverse experience in T&H and provide a clear picture for industrial practitioners to take steps into the metaverse. Exploratory research was adopted, including document analysis, literature review, and in-depth interviews with twelve international metaverse-related company experts. Moreover, this research adopted the thematic analysis technique to analyze the data; the theoretical bases include the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and the components of metaverse as the lens and framework to develop this research. The findings uncovered three scenes of T&H metaverse experiences, including mirror scenes (that reflect the physical and real world in the digital worlds), convergent scenes (that combine the digital and real worlds), and virtual native scenes (that mainly create a whole new virtual scene but still connect to the real world). All of these scenes require IoT to connect the physical world and digital at different levels. Such as, mirror scenes strongly need digital twin techniques through IoT to enhance the authenticity and synchronicity of digital hotels or attractions to immerse guests. Under a convergent scene, connecting via IoT devices to display visitors' paths in the attractions simultaneously or a message board with IoT functionality for users’ social interactions simultaneously. In a virtual native museum, even though users stay in a whole new virtual world, IoT techniques can transfer users from the real world to the virtual world and make them feel physically present. The results provide practical implementations to integrate the IoT into T&H, increasing customers' metaverse experience and enhancing the creative and innovative aspects of the T&H experience.

The extensive application of robots in hospitality and tourism service has transformed the original human-contact into contact-less, so it is necessary to understand the transformation of customers consumption behaviors under this new service mode. While studies have started investigating how service robots enhance the consumer autonomy, the impact of such technology on customers consumption behaviors remains largely unexplored and its underlying mechanism are still unclear. To address this issue, we explore how service robots shape customers autonomous behaviors in hospitality and tourism services. Drawing on the social impact theory, we presented an underlying process in terms of social discomfort, and reveal the boundary conditions.

하와이는 깨끗한 휴양지와 현대적 경관이 어우러진 세계적인 관광지로 써 많은 여행객들의 발걸음을 이끌어왔다. 이뿐 아니라 19세기 중반 이 후 사탕수수 산업의 호황으로 가속화되어온 세계 여러 지역으로부터의 하와이로의 노동이주 물결은 동서문명 조우의 공간이자 다문화주의의 중 심지로서의 발전을 추동케 했다. 이처럼 하와이는 주민들의 상대에 대한 포용과 이해를 바탕으로 한 환대정신과 하와이 관광 산업의 중심축을 구 성하는 환대산업과 더불어 하와이 특유의 문화다양성이 잘 어우러져 세 계적인 환대도시로서의 입지를 공고히 해 왔다. 본 연구는 이러한 하와 이의 관광·다문화를 중심으로 한 환대성의 이면에 교묘한 군사주의와 식 민주의로 대변되는 적대성이 존재한다는 사실을 비판적으로 성찰하였다. 미국은 1893년 하와이를 점령하였으며, 1941년 진주만 피습 이후 이 사 건을 하와이 역사의 중추적 내러티브로 재구성하며 진주만, 특히 USS Arizona 기념관이 하와이의 주력 관광상품으로 발돋움하게 되었다. 이를 통해 그 이면에 은폐된 미국의 군사주의와 원주민의 주권 상실의 역사를 교묘하게 감추어왔다. 또한 본 연구는 하와이를 표상하는 다문화주의의 배경을 환태평양 지역의 제국주의와 식민주의적 맥락에서 고찰하였다. 하와이 왕국을 전복시킨 미국 본토에서 넘어온 백인들은 하와이 사탕수 수 산업을 장악하였고, 이에 따라 값싼 아시아계 노동이민자들의 원활한 정착을 위해 다문화주의를 의도적으로 전파한 정착형 식민주의를 주목할 필요가 있다.

The customer engagement construct has been widely investigated in the marketing literature since 2005. Scholars in hospitality and tourism have perceived the importance of this construct and tried to propose both conceptual framework (e.g., So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016) and measurement scale to capture this phenomena (e.g., So, King, & Sparks, 2014). However, there is no consensus in many issues such as conceptualization (Dijkmans, Kerkhof, & Beukeboom, 2015) and dimensionality (Romero, 2017). In addition, this construct is relatively new in hospitality and tourism. Hence, the direction for future research and what has been done in the past are indispensable for researchers since it reduces research fragmentations in the future. The study aim is to use existing works in hospitality and tourism literature with the systematic literature review to summarize facts and address the future research. SCOPUS and ISI were employed as the main databases to search and identify the relevant articles. A total of 19 out of 590 documents was identified and selected to analyze and classify based on types of research, country, and journal. In addition, the issues of theoretical background, conceptual framework, conceptualization, dimensionality, statistical analysis, key contributors are summarized respectively. Finally, this study addresses the scope of potential future research in a realm of hospitality and tourism.

In today’s highly dynamic tourism and hospitality environment, the role of customer engagement (CE) in customer experience and value is receiving increasing attention from practitioners and academics (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017). Despite this interest, scholarly analysis into the concept and its associated elements has been limited to date. For these reasons, the objective of this study is to present a science mapping approach to analysing the thematic evolution of customer engagement, specifically in the tourism/hospitality and marketing industries. The study applies a bibliometric approach combining co-citation analysis with co-word analysis to reveal and visualize the evolution of customer engagement in the hospitality and tourism areas. Specifically, authors use the SciMat software in order to discover the most important research themes and its conceptual evolution. This technique returns a set of clusters, which can be understood as conglomerates of different scientific aspects. They allow researchers the analysis of the research topics’ dynamic evolution by measuring continuance across consecutive sub-periods. Authors followed the ranking of hospitality and tourism journals considered by Gursoy and Sandstrom (2016) and, the marketing journal ranking developed by Hunt Reimann and Schilke (2009) as criteria for journal selection process. This study has considered the Web of Science (WoS) as the main academic database for collecting research contributions. Findings indicate symptoms of a research field in constant evolution that has not yet reached a stage of maturity. Initially, customer engagement was seen as an important element, but its examination was scarce and has gradually come to be recognized as a key goal within organizations to serve as a basis for the development of various study models. The results obtained from this study will enable future authors studying customer engagement to focus their studies more effectively.

Customers’ opinions on social network platforms are known to influence peer behaviour (Bai, 2011; Eirinaki, Pisal, & Singh, 2012). Customers are also known to be more engaged in sharing their experiences by writing online reviews and recommendations that may be useful to others (Cantallops & Salvi, 2014; Tang & Guo, 2015; Xu & Li, 2016). Actually, user-generated content (UGC) on social network platforms has emerged as an important source for understanding and managing consumers’ expectations, particularly using automated and semi-automated knowledge extraction techniques from text such as text mining and sentiment analysis (Zhang, Zeng, Li, Wang, & Zuo, 2009). This research analyses dimensions of online customer engagement and associated concepts in customers’ reviews through (i) a global sentiment analysis using positive, neutral and negative sentiments and (ii) a topic-sentiment analysis to capture latent topics in online reviews. Furthermore, it examines what influences customers to contribute their online reviews, beyond the features of each focal company or brand. The research methodology is based on a text mining approach, using the MeaningCloud tool. The study focuses on Yelp.com reviews and includes a random sample of 15,000 unique reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightlife entertainment in eleven cities in the USA. An innovative customer engagement dictionary is created, based on previously validated scales using known dimensions of engagement, experience, emotions and brand advocacy, and extended using WordNet 2.1 lexical database. The research findings reveal a high impact of the engagement cognitive processing dimension and hedonic experience on customers’ review endeavour. The study results further indicate that customers seem to be more engaged in positively advocating a company/brand than the contrary. The findings will help social network managers to reinforce their platforms.

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.