Last month, an adapted version of my master’s thesis was published as an article in Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality, an academic journal. The topic of my article – which was co-authored by Abdul Rauf, Ioannis Pantelidis and Johan Winbladh – is Millennials’ perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) in hotel service encounters. For this month’s column, I have decided to summarize and explain the findings for the Foodservice Consultant readers.
I picked Millennials for a variety of reasons. For one, I am a Millennial and Gen Z marketing and employer branding consultant, meaning Millennials and their particularities are always near the top of my mind. However, even if that weren’t the case, Millennials were an obvious choice, not only because of the sheer size of that generational cohort, but also because no generation spends more money on vacations. Millennials are also ‘digital natives’, meaning they are more open to the application of technological innovations than other generations (with the possible exception of their younger siblings, Gen Z). This is good news, given the horrendous staff shortages in many markets. However, although Millennials embrace technology, they also crave authenticity, meaning too much automation might backfire.
In my research, I have looked at four broad service encounters: ‘check-in’, ‘reception services (excluding check-in)’, ‘wellness’ and ‘F&B services’. The goal was to find out how Millennials would react to AI completely replacing humans on the side of the service provider in the context of these four service encounters, and through that, to determine which service encounters are most suited to replacing human employees with AI. To gather the necessary data, I conducted a survey among 169 Millennials from six continents.
The diversity of my sample allowed me to sort the respondents by ‘origin’, ‘gender’, ‘economic well-being’, ‘hotel-type preference’ and ‘attitude towards AI in general’, to see if these factors might have an impact on the results.
Interacting with AI
The results of my research indicate that, although Millennials overall are open to the idea of interacting with artificial intelligence in all hotel service encounters, they slightly prefer this to happen in service encounters in which the AI would not have control over their bodies (in the case of my research: food and beverages services over wellness).
I can imagine that these findings, which are supported by the findings of other researchers, aren’t too surprising to many readers. What readers might be surprised by however is this: seemingly differentiating factors of origin, economic well-being, gender and hotel-type preferences did not have a statistically significant impact on the results. However, if you know Millennials well, you will quickly realize that these findings aren’t so surprising after all, given that they are the first truly global generation, and have more commonalities than differences.
So, what does this all mean? It means that Millennials – the most important consumers in the world – are very much open to the application to AI in hotel service encounters (and probably many other service encounters across the whole service industry).
As I have said before, in a world plagued by staff shortages, this is very good news, even if it will take a while to make a real impact. However, hospitality companies will do well to test starting points for AI, focusing on creating win-win situations for consumers and economic value, carefully avoiding extremes so as not to sacrifice their core service and their authenticity as a result.
Marius Zürcher
About the author:
The co-owner & founder of start-up 1520 in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, Marius Zürcher was a participant at FCSI’s ‘Millennials’ focused roundtable at INTERGASTRA 2018.
