Self-Service Technologies: the Next Frontier in Service Excellence

With tourists' ever-growing expectations, the tourism industry's future will depend on managing information and better understanding their needs to provide a better service experience for their tourists. The experience that remains in tourists' minds as a "wow experience", surpassing their satisfaction level, known as service excellence, is a pivotal factor in returning them. The service encounter is the most critical venue where service excellence is realized as the embodiment of wow-experiences that are key elements of tourists' assessment of service quality. In this context, self-service technologies (SSTs) are among the most successful servers in the delivery system. SSTs can operate alongside personnel or independently, providing tourists with a high-tech and high-touch experience that significantly impacts the provision of excellent service. Apart from companies' claims about their adherence to 'service excellence', customers nowadays expect this from service providers at their destinations. Thus, SSTs influence customers' pleasant experiences, which can generate a degree of delight to entice them to increase their word-of-mouth support and ultimately enhance their loyalty.

Autorentext

Farzad Safaeimanesh is a PhD holder in Tourism Management and a full-time faculty member at Final International University, School of Tourism and Culinary Arts in Kyrenia/North Cyprus. His research interests include tourism technology, service quality, choice modeling, and quantitative and qualitative research methodologies.

Klappentext

With tourists' ever-growing expectations, the tourism industry's future will depend on managing information and better understanding their needs to provide a better service experience for their tourists. The experience that remains in tourists' minds as a "wow experience", surpassing their satisfaction level, known as service excellence, is a pivotal factor in returning them. The service encounter is the most critical venue where service excellence is realized as the embodiment of wow-experiences that are key elements of tourists' assessment of service quality. In this context, self-service technologies (SSTs) are among the most successful servers in the delivery system. SSTs can operate alongside personnel or independently, providing tourists with a high-tech and high-touch experience that significantly impacts the provision of excellent service. Apart from companies' claims about their adherence to 'service excellence', customers nowadays expect this from service providers at their destinations. Thus, SSTs influence customers' pleasant experiences, which can generate a degree of delight to entice them to increase their word-of-mouth support and ultimately enhance their loyalty.