R-Tourism: Introducing the Potential Impact of Robotics and Service Automation in Tourism

Robotics and artificial intelligence are expected to reach their ‘tipping points’ over the nextdecade. Digitalization and service automation are already visible in the tourism sector, raisingquestions on their wider impact on the industry and the holiday-experience per se. Numerousapplication examples and cases of those technologies across the entire holiday value-chain areoutlined and their diffusion drivers are discussed. Apart from providing a typology for R-tourismapplications, this paper makes a strong case for the incorporation of this interdisciplinary areainto mainstream tourism research.