Relationships between tourists and intelligent virtual assistants: promoting the love ties

Abstract

The present working paper intends to explore how tourists and intelligent virtual assistants may relate to each other in order to create love ties. The following research objectives will be pursued: (i) exploring attachment and perceived value as antecedents of love toward the intelligent virtual assistants, (ii) understanding loyalty intentions as outcomes of love toward the intelligent virtual assistants. The findings seem to point out that the attachment process is very effective in developing the love toward the intelligent virtual assistant. Yet, tourists’ values and believes also help with the development of the relational love toward the intelligent virtual assistant. The findings also show that loyalty toward a certain intelligent virtual assistant will be possible when tourists develop a love relationship with it. The current study will put forward several valuable insights about the relationship between tourists and intelligent virtual assistants. These findings will also provide insights for those who are designing AI systems. These results are preliminary findings since we are in the process of collecting more data and further developing the model.