Hospitality is a high personal contact experience. It has its human context importance just as much as infrastructure and F&B, if not more. The “People P” in the services marketing mix makes or breaks a hospitality product. Hospitality services can be divided into the core non-negotiable and supplementary negotiable components.
For example, a 5 star luxury resort will have as its core service component a exceptionally well-appointed room with quiet and tasteful fittings and décor, great dining, and a well-educated, highly presentable, informed and resourceful concierge. As its supplementary negotiable service components there could be a business centre, a game room, and a cigar room.
The Human Touch in Concierge Services
A concierge’s role in a hotel is to provide help and services to a guest such as booking city or adventure tours, making restaurant and theatre reservations, helping with currency exchange, giving intimate details of the locale, and so on. Of course it is not just about the information that a concierge provides; the concierge staff excels in giving a personalised touch to the solutions that a guest might need.
To illustrate, having seen that the guest took some time to look at the flower arrangements in the hotel lobby, the concierge might suggest a very popular flower show that is being held in the city square. A concierge often not only responds to a query but also proactively thinks ahead what the guest might need or want, all the time doing so without being irritating or overbearing. A concierge also treats every guest as a personal mission with more than one mission every day. It can get very exhausting.
To be an effective concierge, one needs strong customer service skills, good communication command, problem-solving abilities, superlative organizing acumen and deep local knowledge. Grace under pressure, quick adaptability, attention to detail, and good time management skills are a must too. Though the hospitality industry cannot avoid the AI and robotic invasion, the relation between customer satisfaction and robotic services has not been studied well enough yet. A research paper by Cheong & Law (2023) attempted to remedy this knowledge gap by exploring the impact of technology o. customer satisfaction in smart hotels. It concluded that in modern times, if precision and speed in delivery are important parameters for guests, then AI, robots and advanced technology can help in improving sustained competition and guest experience.
Robots Enter the Hospitality Industry
The hospitality industry has experimented with different technological innovations such as service robots, AI, and IoT to improve guest experience. Hotel chains like Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, and Mandarin Oriental are already deploying service robots in the United States, such as concierge robots which answer questions, provide directions, entertain children, and provide travel advice), luggage robots which transport baggage and room service robots which perform food delivery services. Cheong & Law (2023) go on to mention that FlyZoo Hotel, the world’s first fully functional smart hotel, and the Japanese Henn-Na Hotel, showcase the future of hospitality. Some guests and hospitality practitioners question the lack of human service interaction and the lack of knowledge on how to handle robot failures (Wirtz et al., 2018).
The hospitality industry is historically a slow adapter of technology, though Covid-19 was a game changer. Banking, healthcare, and e-commerce, have been quick movers in technology adoption. Not so in the hospitality business, where with the exception of chatbots, the usage of new technologies is still very nascent. According to Rawal, et al, (2022) the hospitality industry is hampered by a clear vision for new technologies-enabled solutions
From the hotel guest’s perspective, a robot concierge could have the advantages of multi-language skills, a wide base of data-driven knowledge, a more customized solution to queries and quicker response times. However, a warm smile may be missing from the interaction. From check-in to check-out a guest dealing with a robot concierge seems almost sci-fi, almost Isaac Asimov-ish.
But there are already many customers taking flights in India today who do not interact with humans at all from the airport entry point, through security check, up to the boarding point using DigiYatra facial recognition technology. Though the context of taking a flight and staying at a hotel may be different, due to which the expectations from the use of technology in acquiring and consuming the service may also be different, the point here is that the aviation industry, once considered a high-human interaction industry, is swiftly moving to the use of facial recognition and self-service kiosks including automated baggage handling and pickup systems.
Thus, a movement to the extensive use of robots in the hospitality industry does not seem very far-fetched. As another illustration, hospitals across the world are contemplating introducing/have already introduced automated/robotic systems from OPD processes to high-tech, complex robot-driven surgeries. The hospitality industry will eventually, inevitably follow suit. One of the challenges of the hospitality service industry is the variability of services – where the quality of service delivered often varies from one service provider to the next, one employee to the next, creating dissatisfaction among guests.
Balancing Human and Machine Roles
In addition to hospitality guests, the introduction of robots can also affect hotel staff in many ways. First of all, the fear of losing their jobs is an important consideration. Secondly, there will be more pressure for standardisation of services reducing the ability to be creative (a very human quality). Third, the ability of machines to work tirelessly and at pre-specified efficiency levels at all times is another block in having staff wholeheartedly welcoming the introduction of robots as hotel staff.
On the positive side, robots could definitely take care of the mundane, routine, level 1 & 2 jobs giving more time for humans employees to perform the really important tasks. For a robot concierge, there could be an almost 24×7 employability schedule. There are handicaps that robot concierges might have presently – such as the inability to be warm, caring, and truly empathetic about a guest’s problems other than what is within the algorithmic intelligence in it’s machine brain.
As the digitally native demographic increasingly becomes future hotel guests, the expectations could be successfully managed to not look for excessive human touch elements. Then, this present handicap might actually become assets. As the older generation phases out, and advanced technology use increases in other domains such as daily use e-commerce, medical services, education services, legal and tax services, entertainment services, food services, a population born and brought up on technology will not consider a robot concierge as an innovation or aberration, but just as a natural way of life.
