Are we ready for robot maids in the hotel ındustry? A qualitative study of potential tourist reviews with big data analytics

Abstract

This paper focuses on hotel businesses, which are one of the important parts of tourism. The aim of the study is to determine their thoughts on the use of robot maids in tourism. In addition, it is the sub-purpose of the study to determine how the employment of robots in hotels will affect the purchasing behavior of tourists in the future. The use of technology in tourism and technological readiness literature has focused on tourist satisfaction. Some studies have dealt with the technical aspect of robots. In terms of its purpose, this study fills a gap in the literature. The comments written by potential tourists to the videos about the robot hotel experiences shared by the influencers on YouTube constitute the big data of the study. Out of 18,000 comments on three videos, approximately 12,000 were analyzed with MAXQDA. Potential tourist comments were collected in five themes and 33 affiliated sub-themes. Among the codes, the prominent ones were fear, excitement, unemployment, fear of living, lack of communication, anxiety, indifference, and sincerity. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2023.