CONREC - Effektive Entscheidungsunterstützung von Konsumenten mit konversationsbasierten Empfehlungssystemen basierend auf Social Robots: Identifikation und Evaluierung von relevanten Gestaltungselementen

Tourism recommendation systems can mitigate the potential impact of choice overload on tourists. Social robots are a promising approach to provide recommendations to tourists through an engaging and intuitive user interface on sites like tourist information offices. This study investigates whether tourists perceive tourism recommendations provided via social robots as a satisfying and effective experience and whether tourists respond better to a more human or robotic design of social robot interactions. Therefore, an experiment is conducted at a real-world tourist information office where 60 tourists are exposed to either the more human or robotic version of the social robot recommender system. Their feedback is collected with a survey. The results show that the social robot is perceived positively across
all user-centric evaluation dimensions. This indicates that tourists accept social robots in real-world tourist recommendation situations and would also use them in the future.

Tourism recommendation systems have the potential to alleviate choice overload for travelers. Social robots offer a promising avenue for delivering recommendations in tourist information settings, presenting an engaging and intuitive interface. This research explores tourists’ perceptions of the effectiveness and satisfaction of tourism recommendations provided by social robots as well as their preferences for human-like versus robotic interactions. An experiment was conducted at a tourist information office involving 60 participants exposed to either a human-like or robotic version of the social robot recommender system. Feedback was collected via survey, revealing that the participants responded positively to the social robot across various evaluation criteria. These findings suggest that tourists are receptive to social robots in real-world tourism contexts and would consider using them in the future.