Is Personalized Service No Longer Important? Guests of Smart Hotels May Have Other Preferences

Abstract

Given the promising growth of smart tourism and smart cities, increasing attention has been paid to smart hotels. Through field survey and corpus analysis, some service issues were found (e.g., complicated processes), and the theoretical, as well as the practical significance of improving service quality in smart hotels, were explored. In this paper, we adopted the SERVQUAL model in smart hotels to evaluate the gap between perceived services (PS) and expected services (ES) of guests across five dimensions (i.e., tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy). Following the importance as well as service quality (SQ) ranking of 211 participants, our survey results demonstrated the crucial role of tangibles while the significance of empathy was marked down. The highest and lowest SQ scores were tangibles and assurance. These outcomes highlighted the existing distinctiveness of smart hotels, re-examined the fundamentals of personalized services, and itemized the implications associated with the service optimization of smart hotels.