Today the society is more digitalized than yesterday. Like the rest of the world, the hotel industry is also being more digitalized. In the hotel industry hotels are working a lot with how they can interact the guest to be more active in the value creating processes and have started to adopt self-service technology. Studies today are mostly focused on how to implement more technology but not really about the user experience, especially when it comes to the service holders. The aim of this study is therefore to contribute knowledge about the service holders’ perspective on self-service technologies. The study wants to understand what service holders believe self-service technologies provide and prevent when the hotel industry gets digitalized. A literature study as well as interviews and observation has been made with the purpose to gain new information to be able to carry out a result about the service holders’ experience about the self-service technology. The qualitative material has been analysed and linked with the literature study. The study gave the result that service holders believe the self- service technology to be more effective. Where the self-service station is placed seems to be crucial for its use. Service holders believe personal service to be very important. But in the end they believe it’s the staff that will suffer from the digitalization.

Throughout the last years, the service encounter has gone through drastic changes due to rapid technological developments. The research area of service marketing is therefore putting a stronger focus on the academic field of technology-infused service encounters. Marketers have moreover also started to implement self-service technology (SST) within their service encounters, in order enhance their service delivery. This phenomenon has also been visible within the hospitality industry, whereby the hotel industry has experienced an increasing adoption of SST encounters. Consequently, hotels’ implementation of SST kiosks has enhanced the hotel guests’ participation level within the service encounter. Therefore, this thesis aims to gather insights on the emerging SST customer roles, by investigating the guests’ attitude towards the SST encounter. This leads to the investigation of distinctive SST customer roles within hotels’ self-check-ins.   The choice of the research topic was driven by the fact that existing research about SST implementation in the service encounter, lacks an investigation of the customers’ perspective. Thereby, a research gap was identified that outlays the customers’ enhanced participation as service co-producers. Previous research has focused on investigating customers’ technology acceptance, rather than their own identification as co-producers. Thereof, this thesis will put an emphasis on hotel guests’ attitude towards SST, as a specific aspect of the technology acceptance process. Moreover, this thesis will focus its investigation on self-check-ins within hotels that do not incorporate a human interaction point for their guests. Consequently, in order to investigate the SST customer roles more thoroughly, this thesis will also consider the viewpoint of the hotel. Therefore, qualitative interviews among nineteen hotel guests and one hotel representative were conducted.   The findings of this thesis revealed that SST customer roles cannot be predetermined within a hotel self-check-in. Instead, the hotel guests define their own SST customer roles through a reflection upon their purpose of the hotel stay, expectations of the check-in encounter, arising special needs and perceived benefits of the self-check-in. This determines their individual ‘role file card’, which can be utilized into the proposed SST customer roles archetypes of: technology enthusiast, beneficiary, traditionalist and contradictor. In regard to that, it has been identified that the information provided prior to the hotel guests’ stay, influences the reflection upon their SST customer roles. Moreover, it was discovered that with their increased responsibility over the check-in process, the hotel guests identified themselves as co-producers. Therefore, the findings outlined that the guests would want the price of the hotel stay to reflect their increased involvement in the service delivery.   From a theoretical perspective this thesis bridged the identified research gap of investigating hotel guests’ attitude towards SST, in order to classify the different customer roles that arise within a hotel’s self-check-in. Moreover, the findings revealed practical implications for hotel managers in regards of the need to provide their guests with more information about the SST encounter. Thereby, hotel managers will be enabled to increase their guests’ satisfaction with the SST encounter, as the guests’ expectations would be coherent with the hotel’s offerings.

Developments in information technology and tangible computing facilitate the human’s life by inventing Self Service Technologies SSTs where it changed the way we interact with the environment as well as new technologies did. Nowadays, a lot of new technologies have embodied computer inside such as smartphone and computer tablets. Previous studies in adoption of SSTs research treat customer behavior towards technology based services. However, recent studies recognize that participants have different attitude towards different technologies even if these technologies used to support the same service. Therefore, in our thesis we are going to study the effect of smartphone i.e. iPhone and computer tablets i.e. iPad on adoption of three services of SSTs Internet Banking, Online Shopping and Self Check In Machine at Airports. Is there any hesitation while people adopting with this technology? If yes, why does it happen? Our data were collected by conducting a pilot and empirical study via using quantitative and qualitative approaches. We conducted our study at Umeå, Sweden. The study findings present the effect of adoption through age, family, friends, money, knowledge, using technology in public and private places, mobile technology and computer tablets, and Interface design on adoption SSTs. We found that participants were influenced by new technology for adopting SSTs. Participants did not use Online Shopping as much as they use Internet Banking, especially in the private places. Concerning the Self Check in Machines, participants were differential in which some tend to use it and others did not.