What causes the adoption failure of service robots?

Abstract

With the emergence of AI-powered products and services, the hospitality industry has started to adopt service robots to transform the guest experience. Despite this growing interest, Henn-na Hotel, the world's first robot hotel, recently announced to abandon half of its robots. This study aims to unveil factors leading to the adoption failure of service robots in the hospitality context using Henn-na Hotel as the case study. Through mining online guest reviews from four different leading online booking sites, we conducted thematic content analysis on a total of 250 negative online reviews. A total of six themes emerged from our data (e.g., human intervention, usefulness, embodiment), illustrating various factors resulting in the adoption failure. Based on this, we come up with six design implications for future researchers and designers to re-think about the interaction process between human and robots, as well as how service robots could be better designed and used in hospitality settings to fulfill guest needs.