Chatbot Adoption in Hospitality and Tourism: A Systematic Literature Review with Implications for Technological Readiness in New Zealand

Abstract

Chatbots and conversational artificial intelligence are increasingly used in hospitality and tourism to support customer enquiries, booking assistance, travel planning, service communication, and post-service support. Existing research has identified several factors influencing chatbot adoption, but less attention has been given to the organisational and technological readiness conditions required to support chatbot implementation in practice. This gap is particularly relevant for New Zealand hospitality and tourism, where direct chatbot-specific evidence remains limited. This dissertation addresses the gap by systematically synthesising literature on chatbot adoption, technological readiness, and the alignment between adoption drivers and readiness conditions, with interpretive implications for the New Zealand hospitality and tourism sector.

The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive secondary research approach using a systematic literature review. Following PRISMA 2020 guidance, 142 records were initially identified, 52 duplicates were removed, 90 records were screened, and 28 peer-reviewed studies were included in the final corpus. The selected studies were analysed using thematic synthesis. Coding was organised around three research questions: the factors influencing chatbot adoption in hospitality and tourism, the technological readiness conditions that can be interpreted in relation to New Zealand hospitality and tourism, and the alignment between adoption drivers and readiness conditions.

The findings show that chatbot adoption in hospitality and tourism is shaped by functional, relational, and post-adoption factors. Functional drivers include perceived usefulness, ease of use, information quality, service quality, and task fit. Relational and social-cognitive drivers include trust, privacy risk, anthropomorphism, perceived competence, communication quality, disclosure, and perceived control. Post-adoption outcomes include confirmation, satisfaction, continuance intention, loyalty, rebooking intention, destination visit intention, and service recovery experience. The findings also show that technological readiness depends on organisational capability, technological knowledge, system integration, interoperability, governance, human support, disclosure management, recovery processes, and readiness for more advanced conversational systems.

The dissertation concludes that chatbot adoption and technological readiness should not be treated separately. Chatbot use is most sustainable when customer expectations of usefulness, trust, and service quality are supported by organisational capability, governance, human support, and recovery design. Because direct New Zealand-specific chatbot evidence remains limited, the New Zealand contribution is interpretive rather than empirical. The dissertation contributes by offering a structured adoption-readiness perspective for understanding chatbot implementation in hospitality and tourism, with practical implications for New Zealand.