Abdulaziz Abdullah Obaid

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
Customer perceptions of smart human–AI service experiences are important for understanding how AI-enabled hospitality services influence guests’ behavioral responses. As hotels integrate artificial intelligence into frontline service encounters, understanding how these perceptions shape revisit intention is critical in hospitality marketing. This study examines how customer perceptions of smart human–AI service experiences affect revisit intention, with pleasure, arousal, and dominance serving as mediators within the Pleasure–Arousal–Dominance (PAD) framework. It also investigates the moderating role of digital literacy. Data were collected from guests at four- and five-star hotels in Iraq that offer AI-enabled service experiences. A sampling approach yielded 927 responses, which were analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show that customer perceptions of smart human–AI service experiences significantly enhance pleasure (β = 0.513, p < 0.001), arousal (β = 0.529, p < 0.001), and dominance (β = 0.412, p < 0.001), but have no significant direct effect on revisit intention. Mediation analysis indicates that pleasure and dominance significantly mediate this relationship, whereas the indirect effect through arousal is not significant. Digital literacy exhibits differentiated moderating effects by strengthening the pleasure–revisit intention relationship, showing no significant effect on the arousal–revisit intention relationship, and weakening the dominance–revisit intention relationship. This study contributes to hospitality marketing by demonstrating that smart human–AI service experiences influence revisit intention primarily through emotional responses rather than directly. The findings show that digital literacy varies across emotional dimensions, offering practical guidance for designing customer-centered, AI-enabled hospitality services more effectively.

Acknowledgment
The authors extend sincere gratitude to the University of Anbar, notably the College of Administration and Economics, for their continuous academic support and for providing the institutional environment that enabled the successful completion of this research. The intellectual and infrastructural resources made available by the university were essential in facilitating the study’s theoretical development and empirical implementation.