Volume 18, Number 2, December 2023
| Cold technology and warm services: How smart hotels create a home away from home service for customers
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Abstract
Smart hotels can bring a unique service experience to customers, but excessive technological applications may leave them with a cold feeling. It is imperative to explore an effective way of creating a home-away-from-home service for customers and evaluating such services provided by smart hotels. This study aimed to construct a service quality scale of smart hotels (S-H-QUAL) and delved into factors affecting customers' perception of home away from home (HAFH). This study collected two stages of customer questionnaires. The findings reveal that there were six factors and 30 items in total involved in the S-H-QUAL scale. Trustfulness and personalized innovations endow customers with HAFH at smart hotels, while customer acceptance for smart technology (CAST) can exert positive influences on the relationship between outfield information application and HAFH. These findings can extend the knowledge of service quality and contribute to the development and expansion of service quality theory in smart hotels.
Keywords: Smart Hotel, Service Quality, Service Quality Scale, Home Away from Home
JEL Classification: O32, M31, Q55