Self-Service Technologies

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.