Decision Support at the Point of Sale - The Impact of Recommendations by Social Robots on Tourist Satisfaction

Abstract

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.

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