AI-Enabled Service in Hotels: A Bibliometric Review of Research Trends and Service Quality Outcomes
Abstract
Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Service Automation (RAISA) are rapidly reshaping how hotels design and deliver service, yet existing reviews often mix hotel contexts with other tourism sectors and rarely focus explicitly on service quality. This study provides a hotel-centred bibliometric analysis of AI-enabled service in hotels, with particular attention to service quality, service experience and customer outcomes. We followed a PRISMA flow and collected a dataset from Scopus, containing 313 journal articles published between 2011 and mid-2025. Data analysis and visualisation was done by using both an R package namely bibliometrix and VOSviewer. The results show a unmatured but fast-growing field, with publications accelerating sharply after 2020 and clustering in a small set of core hospitality journals. Author, institution and country analyses reveal a globally distributed but uneven knowledge base dominated by a limited group of prolific scholars and hubs in the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Spain and Malaysia. Keyword co-occurrence, thematic mapping and trending-topics analysis identify four main research topics: AI and service robots in hotel service quality and satisfaction; AI-driven analytics and decision support; customer experience, anthropomorphism and human–robot interaction; and organisational, ethical and societal implications of AI-enabled hotel service. The paper concludes with implications for theory and practice and outlines a future research agenda for AI-rich hotel service environments.
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References
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