Tourists and AI: A political ideology perspective Patrick van Esch a, ⁎, Yuanyuan (Gina) Cui b , Gopal Das c , Shailendra Pratap Jain d , Jochen Wirtz e a Department of Marketing and Professional Sales, Michael J. Coles College of Business, Kennesaw State University, Georgia, United States of America b Department of Marketing, Auckland University of Technology, 120 Mayoral Drive, Auckland 1010, New Zealand c Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore, Bannerghatta Rd, Bangalore, Karnataka, India d Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States of America e National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore article info abstract Article history: Received 20 January 2022 Received in revised form 25 July 2022 Accepted 26 July 2022 Available online xxxx Associate editor: Viglia Giampaolo The tourism industry has adopted AI agents as substitutes for human contact. We examine how tourists respond to AI in hotel service settings during a pandemic. Four studies show that ser- vices featuring human interaction is preferred to AI enabled interaction. Moreover, subjective happiness is identified as the underlying causal mechanism that drives this effect. We provide further nuanced insights by showing that politically conservative tourists discriminate between service agent types more. Theoretically we contribute to a more fine-grained understanding of tourists' responses towards AI by examining an affective and an individual difference factor (political ideology). Practically, marketers are encouraged to incorporate tourists' ideologies and psychographics into segmentation, targeting, and positioning considerations, thereby en- hancing their marketing effectiveness. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Artificial intelligence AI Liberal-conservative Political ideology Service robots Subjective happiness Tourists Introduction The recent pandemic posed serious and unprecedented challenges to economies, public health, livelihoods, consumption, as well as the political climate globally (Das et al., 2021; Van Esch, Cui, Jain, 2021a). In an effort to prevent the spread of harmful pathogens, many countries have resorted to mechanisms like social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and touch-free services. At an individual level, with an uptake in online purchases, offline shopping has begun to be viewed as potentially hazardous, with brick-and-mortar businesses facing an apocalypse like never before (Ozili & Arun, 2020). An outcome of these developments, across many different industries, is the increased momentum in the adoption of ar- tificial intelligence (AI; Bornet et al., 2021; Yu & Schwartz, 2006). This AI-driven transformation is evident in healthcare (e.g., in diagnosis, mapping pandemic spread, and contact tracing), elder care (Čaić et al., 2018; Čaić et al., 2020), and in the hospitality industry. For example, hotels are using AI to sanitize rooms, manage bookings, and facilitate contact-free check-in (Shi, Gong, & Gursoy, 2021). More generally, the pandemic has caused serious challenges in the services sector Annals of Tourism Research 97 (2022) 103471 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: pvanesch@kennesaw.edu (P. van Esch), yuanyuan.cui@aut.ac.nz (Y.(G.) Cui), gopal.das@iimb.ac.in (G. Das), spjain@uw.edu (S.P. Jain), jochen@nus.edu.sg (J. Wirtz). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2022.103471 0160-7383/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Annals of Tourism Research journal homepage: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/annals-of- tourism-research