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Generative AI Chatbot Prompting for Excellent Customer Service in Tourism
Tommi Kekäläinen,
Johanna Heinonen-Kemppi,
Juho Pesonen 
,
Erose Sthapit ,
Brian Garrod
,
Erose Sthapit ,
Brian Garrod
Services Marketing Quarterly, Pages: 1 - 23
Swansea University Author:
Brian Garrod
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DOI (Published version): 10.1080/15332969.2025.2610137
Abstract
The introduction of digital technologies has transformed how businesses achieve and maintain their competitiveness. One of the best-known and most controversial of such technologies is artificial intelligence (AI), which has found many applications across the business domain. AI chatbots are now wid...
| Published in: | Services Marketing Quarterly |
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| ISSN: | 1533-2969 1533-2977 |
| Published: |
Informa UK Limited
2026
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| Online Access: |
Check full text
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa70629 |
| Abstract: |
The introduction of digital technologies has transformed how businesses achieve and maintain their competitiveness. One of the best-known and most controversial of such technologies is artificial intelligence (AI), which has found many applications across the business domain. AI chatbots are now widely employed to provide such services (Hsu & Lin, Citation2023). Studies have shown that AI chatbots can offer many benefits, including the ability to converse naturally and provide personalized recommendations (Dogru et al., Citation2025). This means that AI chatbots are capable of delivering high levels of service quality, which can positively affect purchase intentions, customer satisfaction, and brand engagement (Blumel et al., Citation2024).Chatbots, however, have been found to have a high failure rate, meaning they do not properly understand the customer’s request and fail to provide an optimal response. The ability of Chatbots to accurately read customers’ emotions and respond accordingly is also vital in customer service contexts (Huang & Rust, Citation2024). When chatbots fail, this can lead to reduced customer trust and negative word of mouth, which can be reflected in falling sales and fewer repeat purchases (Janssen et al., Citation2021). The reasons why chatbots fail are not, however, fully understood; nor, therefore, are the best ways to prevent chatbot failure. There is hence a pressing need to evaluate the customer experience of AI and to develop evidence-based remedies (Hsu & Lin, Citation2023).Especially novel generative-AI chatbots have the potential to change customer-firm interactions. However, the shift from in-person interactions to automation can be challenging for tourism services (Dwivedi et al., Citation2024), with a high failure rate a potential barrier. A possible remedy to the tendency for generative-AI chatbots to fail is to fine-tune them using a technique known as prompting. This involves training the chatbot with further background information and example inquiries to optimize its outputs (Henrickson & Meroño-Peñuela, Citation2025). Robust and reliable studies are, however, needed to explore how prompting might serve to improve the quality of service provided by chatbots and, thereby, the customer experience. AI raises novel issues, such as promises of cost savings and increased work efficiency but also concerns about how AI can handle complex interactions in a culturally appropriate way (Wang, Citation2025).The purpose of this study is, therefore, to investigate the impact of different prompting techniques on the quality of chatbot responses across various dimensions of customer service in the tourism context. In doing so, the study aims to understand how chatbots can enhance customer service and overall customer satisfaction for tourism businesses. As explained in the following section of the article, the focus will be on how to employ prompting best to enhance the effectiveness of customer-service chatbots used by tourism companies and destinations. Tourism is chosen as the context for this study because it relies heavily on service delivery, which necessitates continuous evaluation and improvement of service quality (Augustyn & Ho, Citation1998). Tourism is also a particularly complex service-product, where there are ample opportunities for quality gaps to open and for customer service to be required to remedy them (Augustyn, Citation1998). Finally, tourism is chosen as the context for this study because tourism companies have widely adopted chatbots, which have numerous potential applications in this context (Carvalho & Ivanov, Citation2024). |
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| Keywords: |
Artificial intelligence; chatbots; customer service; prompt engineering; service quality |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
1 |
| End Page: |
23 |