Hotel service robots as experiential touchpoints: a modified robotic TOCE model

This study applies the Tourist On-site Co-creation Experience (TOCE) framework to examine how hotel service robots shape guest experience in a non-human service context. Drawing on value co-creation and human-robot interaction perspectives, the study explores how robot-mediated encounters become part of on-site hotel experience formation. A total of 438 online reviews from hotels that have adopted service robots were analyzed using a two-stage approach combining Leximancer 5.0 and manual thematic analysis. The findings show that robot encounters generally follow a main value co-creation pathway, in which robots stimulate curiosity, active participation, playful novelty, and social interactions. Robots function not only as service tools, but also as experiential touchpoints within the hotel stay. At the same time, this co-created value is fragile and may shift toward co-destruction under specific boundary conditions, including functional incompetence, embodiment-related discomfort, and service disruption. Based on these findings, the study proposes a Modified Robotic TOCE Model that explains how robot encounters move through a dual-pathway process of co-creation and conditional failure. The study contributes to hospitality and tourism research by extending TOCE to robot-mediated service encounters and offers practical implications for hotel robot design, deployment, and service delivery.