The global tourism industry has maintained rapid growth since 2010. However, ageing populations worldwide have created labour shortages. Therefore, many new technologies have been applied to hotels to solve this problem. The application of new technologies in hotels has changed the physical components of service delivery systems in regard to structure, infrastructure, and integration. Previous studies have defined mixed service delivery system as consisting of human-robot collaborations in service delivery. With the continuous application of new generations of information technology, mixed service delivery system has been widely used in the hotel industry. This study investigates the effects of mixed service delivery system from the perspectives of frontline employee job engagement and service delivery, aiming to determine the effects of mixed service delivery system in five-star hotels, especially in regard to frontline employees' job engagement and service delivery.
Three different service delivery system processes are presented in the study. The researcher constructs a conceptual model involving mixed service delivery system, employees' job engagement, and service delivery. Based on this model, a questionnaire is designed. In this study, a back-translation approach is applied to translate the English questionnaire into simplified Chinese. Then, the study conducts an empirical survey in five-star hotels in China's hinterlands. The research first carries out a pilot study, followed by the main survey questionnaire. Five-star hotels in 12 cities in China's hinterlands are selected for empirical investigation and frontline employees in the hotels are randomly sampled. After screening the data, 406 respondents valid responses are gathered. The study analyses the data using SPSS 26 and AMOS 26. Structural equation modelling is used to test the 28 hypotheses of the research. In addition, the measurement invariance of mixed service delivery system and the structural invariance of the second model are evaluated.
The research determines the key characteristics of mixed service delivery system in five-star hotels and investigates the factors that have impacts on frontline employees' job engagement and service delivery. The results confirm that five-star hotels' mixed service delivery system has direct positive effects on frontline employees' job engagement. Mixed service delivery system has no significant positive direct effects on service delivery. Frontline employees' job engagement has significant positive effects on service delivery. Furthermore, after testing all of the hypotheses in the four research models, the study confirms the best way to design a service delivery system in order to increase frontline employees' job engagement and efficiently deliver services. The research can provide a basis for the design of service delivery systems in five-star hotels as it identifies factors that can affect frontline employees' job engagement and service delivery efficiency. Thus, based on the research findings, hotel owners or managers can take appropriate measures to improve frontline employees' job engagement and service delivery efficiency, which can in turn improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.