Samenvatting

Given the hospitality industry's quick rebound and volume growth in most OECD nations following the Great Recession, the hotel sector in the Netherlands is currently experiencing a severe labour shortage that predates the Covid-19 epidemic (Joppe, 2012). Staff shortages and cost-cutting measures in the industry have increased stress amongst the remaining workforce and forced HR departments to investigate alternative recruitment methods and social robots.
The commissioner, a Netherlands-based software start-up called WELBO, is committed to making the use of social robots in service-oriented sectors as simple as possible and facilitating human-robotic co-creation. WELBO assigned the students, later referred to as the researcher, to identify the main barriers for hospitality businesses not to employing social robots in their operations and to validate whether their OpEx sales approach, which includes an initial implementation, is the most suitable for the product.
Through secondary literature, internal company data and interviews with three industry experts, six different barriers were identified and weighted according to the level of impact. As the industry increasingly uses more disruptive technologies to compensate for routine operational tasks, shareholders are interested in understanding the underlying benefits of social robots. Since this technology is a standalone device and the complexity of an initial implementation differs between the hardware-software combinations, skilled employees, so-called professionals, are needed to exploit all possible capabilities. The following MRQ was therefore formulated:
To what extent does a professionally implemented social robot impact the guest perception in a hotel front office environment?

The research setup was based on the field experiment of Martijn Boogert, who investigated the difference in guest perception between human-to-human and human-to-robot interactions through a non-professional implementation in the front office environment of HTH campus in Amsterdam. The researcher used his professional experience from the internship at WELBO BV to design a new application, including information provided through an advanced interaction flow and guiding possibilities. Thereupon, the robot Temi was professionally implemented in the exact location. The 'Experience of Hospitality Scale' was used to measure the guest perception of 167 interactors.
Through the use of SPSS version 29, differences between the new and old experiments, as well as the new dataset of human vs robot services, were tested. Boogerts found a significantly more negative guest perception for 5 of 7 factors of the human-to-robot interaction. The new experiment revealed no significant differences between human and robot services, hence a comparable guest perception. When comparing both experiments' human and robot service scores, surprisingly, a decrease was identified for all seven factors. However, human services decreased on average by nearly 4% more than robot services. The research additionally revealed that human services at HTH reception cannot be described as constant and that students somewhat feel restricted from approaching humans when asking repetitive questions due to the fear of being defamed.
Variables such as weather and noise pollution and their impact on both interaction types were examined.
Two solutions for knowledge sharing were created based on the knowledge gained through initial research and the conducted field experiment. A presentation aims to inform all employees of WELBO sufficiently, and an infographic was created to spark interest in purchasing 'Sprints' and a high subscription level amongst current and potential customers.
The solution was disseminated to various stakeholders, including representatives of the HTH research centre, the industry expert Peter J. Leitgeb and fellow LYCar students.
To conclude, professionally implemented social robots have a measurable impact on.