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Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has put the hospitality industry on the path to a high-tech and low-touch future. The most significant changes caused by the pandemic in hospitality are customers’ concerns for social distancing, hygiene, health and sustainability (Hao et al., 2020). These changes will continue in the post-pandemic era and become the hospitality industry’s “new normal.” As part of the “new normal,” contactless service, which is technology-enabled, touchless and adaptable, has emerged as an innovative service design during the pandemic (Min, 2020). This allows hospitality firms to create the safest possible guest and staff experience, while maintaining high-quality service (Hao et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2021).
In this study, contactless hospitality service is defined as a contactless and fully disinfected service procedure and environment using a combined package of self-service, robotic services and internet of things (IoT)-based implements. Contactless service is designed to reduce COVID-19 virus transmission by avoiding human-to-human contact and reducing surface contact in public areas. Personal contact is substituted with robotic reception, self-check-ins, guest room voice control, robotic delivery and robotic concierge services (Zeng et al., 2020). Due to the pandemic, many hospitality firms are currently attempting to assemble contactless technology to deliver a seamless contactless service to their customers. Contactless service is designed to cover major touchpoints across different phases of a customer’s journey (Serrano and Kazda, 2020). Figure 1 shows how contactless touchpoints are implemented in the lodging sector across several phases of the customer journey.
Contactless service is not an invention instigated by the pandemic because many contactless technological modules (e.g. contactless payment, facial recognition and keyless access) already existed before the COVID-19; however, the pandemic has accelerated their implementation worldwide. That said, a key concern for hospitality practitioners is the unknown return on investment (ROI) for contactless service (Hotel News Now, 2020). Therefore, the potential ROI of contactless service requires careful analysis due to its cost.
Customer equity is an important aspect of return for marketing investments (Blattberg and Deighton, 1996). Recently, several studies have analyzed customer equity in the field of business, service and marketing (Gao et al., 2020; Ho and Chung, 2020; Ou and Verhoef, 2017; Kim et al., 2020). The business world is gradually organizing itself...