An empirical investigation of tourist’s choice of service delivery options – SSTs vs. service employees

What is it about?

The present study offers and examines a conceptual model of tourist innovativeness towards self-service technologies (SSTs) to confirm whether tourists prefer service delivery by SSTs over employees in an offline hospitality environment. Tourists’ perceived usefulness (PU) of SSTs and need for interaction (NI) with service employees have been taken as crucial mediating variables to examine the effects of perceived ease of use (PEOU) and technology readiness index’ (TRI) personality dimensions towards SST and employee-based service adoption. Findings reveal that both ‘NI’ and ‘PU’ play significant roles in technology readiness and acceptance model (TRAM) when tourists select one of two service delivery options - SSTs and service employees. The foremost limitation of the study is its dependence on domestic tourist samples. However, such samples were chosen because tourists comprising these samples tend to use similar service delivery options more, in turn increasing their use of SSTs available in sample hotels. The study gives a deeper understanding of TRAM with an extremely crucial mediating variable (NI) in an offline service context. It also provides useful insights to service providers and policy makers for developing new strategies and policies to enhance user experience. This study recommends the usage of numerous SSTs by tourists. During extensive literature review carried out in this research, no study was found that proposed such an effective framework in an offline service context.

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