6
Disruptive Technologies
in Hotels
A2 Essay
Due Date: 7th June 2022
Module: Contemporary Issue and Management of Change - TH60166E
, The technological advancement that has been seen in the last few years has affected and
completely changed many businesses' operations. This essay will firstly briefly explain disruptive
technologies. It will then critically analyse the main opportunities and limitations of Artificial
Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) within hotels. Furthermore,
each technology's possible impact on service level provision will be evaluated. This will be done
by analysing academic research papers, practitioners' experts, and hotels such as the Peninsula
Hotel, the Hotel Henna, and Marriott International. In conclusion, a debrief of what was evaluated
will be provided.
Disruptive Technology (DT) includes technologies that drastically disrupt the way customers,
industries, or business function. These are, for instance, VR, such as virtual hotel tours; AR, such
as interactive hotel rooms and maps; and AI, such as chatbots and robots (Shin et al., 2019). DT
washes away old systems or behaviours as it has superior characteristics. As with any
technology, it can be considered a means to improve lives and broaden horizons (O'connor, 2016).
However, it has both positive and negative repercussions. In the hospitality industry, especially in
hotels, increased reliance on technologies has been seen as part of service delivery and operations
(Cain et al., 2019). Ivano et al.'s (2019) suggested that early adoption of new technology is critical
for achieving a competitive advantage. Being open to acquiring, absorbing, successfully
integrating, and commercialising new technologies is an economic transformation process, and it
can be a strategic investment in increasing firm profitability and growth (Liu & Hung, 2019). The
hospitality industry has witnessed the rise of technology profoundly impact how hotels run and
perform today.
One of these DTs vastly used within hotels is AI; this term was created by John McCarthy, an
American computer scientist, in 1956 (Sun Tung, 2017). As evaluated in Chain et al.'s (2019)
research, AI has a mechanised intelligence as a result of the convergence of knowledge
representation (the creation of a language to communicate information) and knowledge
manipulation (the limitation of search space to a reasonable quantity and natural language
processing) (Cain, Thomas, and Alonso, 2019). The number of real-world robots and AI
applications in hotels is growing worldwide. For example, in Tokyo, the hotel Henn na is totally
