Decision Support in Tourism through Social Robots

Tourism recommendation systems can mitigate the potential impact of choice overload on tourists. Social robots are a promising approach to provide recommendations to tourists through an engaging and intuitive user interface on sites like tourist information offices. This study investigates whether tourists perceive tourism recommendations provided via social robots as a satisfying and effective experience and whether tourists respond better to a more human or robotic design of social robot interactions. Therefore, an experiment is conducted at a real-world tourist information office where 60 tourists are exposed to either the more human or robotic version of the social robot recommender system. Their feedback is collected with a survey. The results show that the social robot is perceived positively across all user-centric evaluation dimensions. This indicates that tourists accept social robots in real-world tourist recommendation situations and would also use them in the future.