“Contactless service is being widely adopted by the hotel industry”, explain the researchers, “to provide the safest possible experience while maintaining good service quality”. By deploying contactless technologies at every stage of the customer journey, hotels can remove the need for physical contact from all major hospitality service encounters.
This may include “disinfection of public facilities and spaces, auto-detection of body temperature, keyless access, touchless smart rooms, and robotic services”, note the researchers. By meeting hotel guests’ need for more stringent safety and hygiene protocols, such contact-free provision can enhance customer satisfaction and trust and lead to more positive evaluations of hotels.
However, there is another side to the story. “Contactless hospitality service is expensive and has uncertain returns on investment”, the researchers warn. For example, some customers may be reluctant to pay a surcharge for contact-free amenities because they prefer “the human touch” or regard contactless technologies as unnecessarily complex. “Some customers believe that contactless technological implementation reduces the cost of hotel operation and management, thus expecting that they should be charged less”, add the authors.
Surprisingly, given the widespread implementation of contactless services in hotels to provide safe, seamless and efficient services, we still know little about how they are received by hotel guests. “Customers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for contactless service is still unclear in the hospitality industry”, say the authors.
This lack of understanding is putting hotels at a disadvantage. “There is a mismatch in the supply and demand of different contactless amenities”, observe the researchers. While most hotels are willing to invest in self-service check-in, keyless access, food ordering and concierge services, customers prefer contactless payments, digital room keys and digital messaging services. “Therefore, exploring customers’ WTP for various contactless amenities is critical to guide hotels’ investment”, the researchers point out.
WTP for hotel amenities – including contactless services – may vary with hotel type and customer-related factors. “Luxury and mid-priced hotel guests have higher WTP for green practices than economy hotel guests”, the researchers report. Guests’ age, education and income level, as well as their travel-related decisions, technology readiness and health concerns, may also affect how willing they are to pay for contactless services.
Integrating these diverse constructs, the researchers developed a novel series of discrete choice experiments to explore hotel guests’ preferences regarding various contactless services. The first step was to identify the relevant attributes of contactless service in a hotel setting, based on interviews with hotel managers and contactless service technology providers in China. “Six amenities of contactless service in the hotel industry were identified”, the researchers report. These were “contactless front desk”, “elevator”, “room entrance”, “payment”, “smart room devices” and “robotic services”.
Together with the price of a room for a night, these six types of contactless amenities were bundled into hypothetical hotel room packages for testing with real hotel guests. “We designed a series of discrete choice experiments to capture hotel guests’ WTP in various scenarios”,