Greeting the Guest: A Welcome Experience for First Encounters in Smart Airbnb

COVID-19 has caused disruptions in the sharing economy for both platforms and owners, and Airbnb is promoting a contactless service to protect the health of hosts and guests. Through smart technology, some hosts are beginning to support contactless services, allowing guests to check in independently and flexibly. Guests, on the other hand, expect to be greeted upon arrival, and existing contactless services rarely investigate how Airbnb can support the emotional value of a guest’s sense of welcome. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing body of research on how smart Airbnb expresses welcome to support the emotional value of guests. We investigate the use of multimodality ambient information displays as welcoming expression systems in the Airbnb context rather than focusing on software solutions on the mobile device itself. We conducted a three-part investigation that began with a guest experience sampling study and co-design initial impressions to support an authentic guest experience with Airbnb hosts. The findings of this study were then used in a design workshop to help us develop three different ways to welcome guests. We present qualitative findings from a subsequent study in which 14 people tried out those modalities in our Airbnb lab. Finally, we compare the initial results of various welcoming modalities and discuss implications for welcome expression design in the Airbnb context. According to our UEQ scale and thematic analysis, sound can be quickly understood but easily ignored during check-in, visuals have better attractiveness but require consideration of information overload, and physicals are the most novel but can cause a sense of loss of control and over-interpretation. Based on our findings, we present design considerations for emotional value-supportive design in smart Airbnb. Our research identifies potential issues and challenges for multimodality in smart accommodations to consider when supporting guests’ emotional values, and designers can use different modalities to express emotional information in their practice.


INTRODUCTION
The pandemic of Covid-19 has posed a significant challenge to the sharing economy, travel restrictions and social distancing have had a significant impact on digitally rented accommodation services [20].With Airbnb as the representative of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) accommodation, need to adapt to the new normal brought about by the pandemic in order to survive, contactless service has become an issue to consider [2,31].Contactless check-in is safer and more hygienic than in-person meet-and-greets, and guests have more flexible arrival times and a better experience while saving time and boosting revenue for hosts [39].
With the growing popularity of smart devices and the Internet of Things (IoT), the hospitality industry is beginning to support a contactless guest experience through smart technology, also known as the Smart Guest Experience [15].Airbnb hosts are encouraged to rearrange their spaces with smart technology to support guests' self-service [3,17].Some pioneer Airbnb hosts are experimenting with commercial IoT products through trial and error processes (e.g.[13,27,41]).However, due to the lack of expertise and financial resources, those ordinary hosts are limited to simple functions, such as setting the keycode of a smart locker and sharing it with the guests.
The guest's perceived experience in smart accommodation involved two fundamental values: functional and emotional [4,34].On one hand, guests need convenient control, privacy, and security functions, while on the other hand, guests expect enjoyment, empowerment, and personalized emotional experiences [23,24,30].A few papers have examined the implications of technological advances in smart accommodation, most of them focus on functional values, such as device control [13] and privacy considerations [27], leaving the guest's perceived emotional value of such technology in delivering enhanced services largely under-explored.
Supporting emotional value through technology is becoming a new way for hosts to respond to fierce competition.The unique and personalization of the experience determines the guest's intent to choose the smart accommodation [24,34].Therefore, designing and exploring smart accommodation experiences to support guests' emotional value is important.Firstly, it will inspire HCI designers to do practices that support the emotional value of guests.Secondly, assist scholars in exploring guests' understanding of emotional actions in smart accommodation.
The sense of welcome is an important factor of guests' perceived emotions in hospitality [26,35,40].In contactless Airbnb, the hosts strive to make the welcome more unique with a greeting message, handwritten cards, and snacks with local specialties.In this paper, technology that makes Airbnb homes feel like home is used as an example to show how technology could be used to support emotional values.Our research question is: What kind of welcoming interaction from technology will make guests feel welcome?How do guests understand the welcoming interaction from technology?
Based on our preliminary experience sampling study of 12 guests' routines in Airbnb [5] and generative co-design guest experience study with 6 Airbnb hosts, we learned about the behavioral practices of guests during the check-in process and the three interaction modalities that technology could interact with guests in Airbnb: sound, visual and physical.For the next generative study, we invited 2 animators, 2 sound designers, and 3 product designers to work together to design the welcome modalities inspired by the co-design result with the hosts.Lastly, We conducted initial user experience testing and interviews with 14 participants.This paper makes two contributions: (I) an investigation into how different technological interaction modalities can affect the trade-off between function and emotion; and (II) design implications on how to support guest emotional value through smart technology based on test results.

RELATED WORK
We give a short summary of the relevant research on smart Airbnb and the welcome experience.

Airbnb and Smart Home
Airbnb has become popular as ordinary hosts share their homes through sharing [7,11].With the common installation of smart home devices by hosts, they are beginning to share their smart devices to enhance the guest experience [13,27].Staying in advancedtechnology-enhanced accommodations, such as smart homes, provides value-added services due to varying degrees of automation, interactivity, intelligent control, and monitoring [28].These functions allow users to control their water and power consumption, lowering costs and increasing comfort [21].As a result, using technology in Airbnb can increase the sustainability of services, resulting in financial benefits, improve facility management, and ensure a higher level of responsiveness to the needs of the occupants [34].

Smart Guest Experience
Smart guest experience refers to giving guests the correct service in the right area and at the right time [15].Based on the description of Kabadayi [23], the smart guest experience could be seen as guests' subjective responses to smart services are shaped by guest empowerment, seamless experience, the accuracy of service delivery, privacy and security, and overall enjoyment.Similarly, Neuhofer [30] also mentioned that smart guest technology triggers guests' empowerment and personalized expectation in experience creation.Kim [24] further summarized that a smart guest experience should have four attributes: convenience and control, maintenance and safety, non-contact environment, and personalization.During the epidemic, the contactless feature has brought the smart guest experience to the forefront of researchers' minds.However, there isn't a lot of academic discussion about the practice of empowering and personalizing guests, so we wanted to look into how technology could help meet these emotional needs.

Welcome Experience in Airbnb
The authenticity that comes from guests' being welcomed by locals makes Airbnb accommodations unique in the hospitality industry [18,40]. the welcome was used to express a greeting to a guest or newcomer upon arrival 1 , it is associated with body language that expresses pleasant (e.g.smile and open) and also with a familiar visual marker (e.g, butterfly, and flower), which is seen to convey welcome and belonging [26].The responses conform to the social and esteem needs of the individual identified by Maslow [29].In Airbnb, guests could gain a sense of welcome through the host's hospitality [40].However, with the global trend toward remote and contactless functionality, an increasing number of guests are opting for vacation rentals that offer a self-check-in option [1].To keep Airbnb appealing, it will be important to think of other ways to greet people when hosts aren't there.

USER-CENTERED DESIGN PROCESS
We used user-centered and participatory design approaches to explore the use of technology to support the emotional experience of guests [32].First, we used the user experience sampling method [25] to investigate the interaction scenarios that guests attend to in their experience, and based on these scenarios, we worked with the hosts to speculate on the authenticity of the experience they would like to provide to their guests through co-speculation [12].Secondly, we worked with designers and researchers to generate a set of technology prototypes.The role of a prototype is to support a kind of stabilizing process through which future practice(s) are imagined and realized [16].Our research is currently engaging Airbnb users to evaluate and understand how technology is supporting their emotional experience.

Co-design Bespoke Proposals with Host
Based on a previous experience sampling study in 24 Airbnb [5], we discovered that guests' first impressions of Airbnb were influenced by their check-in experience.These encounters took place primarily in the foyer and living room.As a result, the items with which guests interact in these two scenes, such as hangers, room booklets, snacks on the table, and decorative items, are appropriate vehicles for expressing a sense of welcome.
Even though designers can't control how people feel, they can make people feel and think in certain ways by changing the atmosphere.Therefore, inspired by Desjardins et al., [12], we used a co-design bespoke booklet approach (see figure 1 No.1 ) with Airbnb hosts to investigate the authentic experience they wanted to provide to their guests.After our Airbnb tour and interviews with 6 hosts, we crafted bespoke designs to support the authenticity of the guest experience based on items in the host's home and put sketches and usage flows into a bespoke booklet.The hosts received the booklet and were given 1-4 weeks to reflect on these designs and make modifications, and add some design proposals.
Our results demonstrate that the sense of welcome is one of the most important aspects that technology can contribute to and summarize three strategies that Airbnb uses to engage with its guests.We analyzed the 54 designs generated by co-design through the affinity diagram method [12,19], which shows that technology can support the expression of welcome by combining context and timing, and using friendly metaphors.At the same time, we found that technology interacts with guests through three main modalities: physical (i.e., symbolic friendly objects), visual (i.e., lighting effects or screens), and sound (i.e., smart speakers or inherent sound through devices).From these design solutions, we selected three modalities to do generalized design for welcome purposes respectively (see figure 1 No.2,3,4 ).

Welcome Design Proposal Generalization
As these design proposals came from different Airbnb-specific scenarios, we invited three product designers, two sound designers and two animators to work together to generalize these proposals.All of them have post-graduate degrees and have been designing in the fields of product design, user experience, animation, and sound for more than two years.Our workshop process was split into two parts so that we wouldn't be too limited to the Airbnb scene and come up with only a few ideas: 1) Come up with three ways to express a sense of welcome through design.2) Changes to the real-world context based on what the co-design with the host showed.
To rationalize the application of three modalities for a welcoming experience, we correlated different modalities with welcome-related scenarios.Specifically, 1) in terms of sound, the sound designers recommended three pieces of music that could convey the welcome message (see figure 2 No.1), and all designers worked together to filter and edit the music, taking into account the timing of the trigger, the content and length of the music, and the design of the volume change over time.Finally, we thought that playing music after the guests entered the door was the best moment to express welcome.2) In terms of visual design, two animators provided sketches of animations that could express the sense of welcome (such as figure 2 No.2), and after discussion among all designers, we associated this animation with the guests' habit of checking important information and WiFi passwords in the room, and delivered the welcome message to the guests through a short and humorous animation when they were looking for information.When guests are looking for information, a short and humorous animation conveys the message of welcome.
To design for 3) physical: Inspired by previous physical welcoming study [6,22], we generated 10 physical interaction design proposals with three product designers based on co-design results with the host, all proposals were designed based on devices that guests might interact with when they first enter Airbnb (e.g.lights, hangers, and living room decorations).The 10 designs were sent to WhatsApp's Airbnb user group for voting, where 44 participants voted and 18 of them continued to be interviewed about our evaluation of these designs (see figure 2 No.3 & 4).In the end, we combined the functional and aesthetic aspects of the participants' concerns and integrated the concepts of the hanging hook and butterfly to create the final designs (see figure 3 No.1).

Setting Up Prototype
Since smart Airbnb are still at the forefront of technology and has limited consumer visibility, we utilized a technique called user enactment [14,33] to identify Airbnb's patterns of and preference for interaction with such a system.Specifically, inspired by [9,33,42], we built living rooms in our lab to simulate the Check-in scenario in Airbnb and understand the impact of the welcome actions of technology on their Check-in experience through observations and interviews of participants' behavior.
Our final design involved a group of modalities: sound interaction from a smart speaker, visual interaction on smart TV, and physical hooks to interact with guests.Airbnb will automatically play a welcome sound when guests enter and greet them by name at the end, a screen displaying room check-in information (e.g., wifi password) will trigger a welcome animation when guests approach (see figure 3 No.2), and a butterfly near the hanging hook will interact with guests by flapping its wings when they take different room keys or settle down clothes.

EMPIRICAL PROCEDURE
Currently, we have started conducting empirical tests on this set of prototypes.The purpose of the testing is threefold: 1) to further refine the design through feedback from Airbnb users.2) to understand the potential impact of technology on the Airbnb user experience and to stimulate design thinking among Airbnb users.3) to evaluate the impact of various modalities on participant interaction in application scenarios, and to systematize the three prototypes based on participant feedback.We recruited guests with the aim of "exploring the future of technology and Airbnb guest interactions" to avoid possible positive bias.
Our current experiment was created to learn how guests react to these technologies and how interactions affect their emotional experience.We anticipate that the first round of participants will have some prior experience with technology and will provide professional evaluation and opinion-based feedback on the design.As a result, we chose 14 Airbnb users with backgrounds in design disciplines (e.g., industrial design, computer science, automation, etc.).These users are between the ages of 20 and 35, have a bachelor's degree or higher, and have used Airbnb for at least two years.
In a lab setting, studying technologies intended for the domestic context simplifies the complexity of real Airbnb.For example, the Figure 2: 1.Three local Dutch music tracks were chosen by two sound designers to create a welcoming atmosphere.2. Animators' creations simulate two small balls that greet guests as they jump, morph and text to create a welcoming atmosphere.3. We conceived smart devices that fit the Airbnb scenario and explain in a poll how they express welcome through different movements.4. We interviewed some of the voters and learned that they were interested in the practical value of the lamp and hanger, and the aesthetic value of the butterfly.Ultimately, we believe that the combination of hooks and butterflies makes more sense and balances the needs of both values.
Figure 3: 1.We expressed welcome to the guests through the butterflies that could flap their wings next to the hooks.we distinguished the hooks from the interactive parts by color, and we placed objects such as keys on the hooks to simulate authentic use during the test.2. We designed different layouts in different rooms, while the size of the screen would change.3. Participants would explore these designs independently during the experiment, and we observed and recorded their behavior.
guest always visits all of the rooms and unpacks their belongings.This limitation in our findings' generalizability must be carefully considered when applying the findings to more complex real-world or multi-guest applications.To represent a sample of routine situations in our study, we created a check-in scenario that included potential interactions with Airbnb.Participants are invited to complete the following reference tasks, the order of which is entirely up to them: (1) Drop off personal items.Guests can leave their belongings and their clothing in the Airbnb living room.
(2) Airbnb home tour.Guests visit Airbnb to familiarize themselves with the space.
(3) Go over the information.As guests get to know the Airbnb space, they will look for practical information, like wifi passwords, that they need.We adopted the Wizard of Oz technique to stimulate actions in the Check-in scenario.At the start of the experience, we asked participants to imagine themselves visiting a smart Airbnb for the first time and interacting with the smart home system when they opened the door.We determined when the prototype would be triggered and how extensive the changes would be based on the artifact layout, the participants' path of exploration, and the focus of their gaze (see figure 3 No.3).When participants thought they were finished with the experience, they indicated the researcher to stop.
When the guests indicated that they were finished exploring, we asked them to complete a user experience quality (UEQ) scale [37] for each of the three modalities, and then we conducted semistructured interviews based on their scores.For example, when the physical prototype scored significantly higher than the other two modalities for INTERESTING, we asked what made the physical experience more significant.Each study took 30-45 minutes.

PRAGMATIC AND HEDONIC QUALITY
Our data collection consisted of quantitative data from the User Experience Quality Scale [36] and qualitative data generated from the corresponding scale results.We analyzed the scale results using the tools provided by the UEQ website2 and further found evidence for interpreting the data in conjunction with a thematic analysis [38] of the interview content.To respond to the first research question, what kind of greeting makes guests feel welcomed in smart Airbnb, we first compared the performance of three modalities in expressing welcome (see figure 4 No.1).Next we answered the second research question and evaluate design quality by analyzing participants' understanding of three modalities (see figure 4 No. 2,3,4).Preliminary data analysis provides the basis for future improvements in the design of our prototype and for further research directions.
Sound Concept: Entry Greeting Music Compared to the other two modalities, the sound modality did not outperform and had the lowest hedonic quality (0.28).In particular, Sound has a significant advantage on Perspicuity (2), indicating that guests familiar with this modality and easy to understand.However, it also has the lowest value of novelty (-0.27), which looks stereotypical in this scene.Similarly, sound design shows lower values on stimulation (0.83), the other two modalities have more advantages to make users motivated to use and enjoyable.The data clearly shows that our sound's design matches our guests' intuition and can be well understood by them in the context of automatic playing.However, it is far less novel than the other two modalities, probably because the current design is very common in current life.
In terms of design quality, there is still a lot of improvement to be made in the design of our sound (see figure 4 No.2).With the exception of Perspicuity, which has an excellent performance, most of the indicators are below average, especially novelty.Dependability has a lot of space for improvement compared to benchmarks, contrary to the results of the comparison with other modalities.We believe the main reason for this is that the autoplay sounds are easily ignored, "I didn't notice the music when I came in" (P2), "I didn't have time to listen carefully to the sound before it ended" (P5), and specifically, the guests' attention was mainly on the visual level after the introduction."I was looking at the butterfly and suddenly I heard my name" (P11).In addition, the lack of personalization and humanization of the audio also affects the experience, "Everyone has different music preference... " (P7), "The name sounded like AI reading... " (P1).
Visual Concept: Welcome Animation Our visual design had the highest attractiveness (1.5) and pragmatic quality (1.38), probably because the initial stage of the screen was rich in practical information that motivated guests to learn more and come forward to view it.Specifically, the quick response of animation and organized content made the screen more efficient (1.19) than sound and physical.At the same time, visual design has significant advantages in terms of dependability (1.21), mainly in terms of supportive and security.Overall, the advantages of visual design in the experience are mainly in the efficient and reliable delivery of information, while guests can quickly understand the principles of smart TV interaction by approaching and leaving.
The visual design mostly presents a good level of overall user experience, however, the novelty remains a huge challenge, while the stimulation is also below average (see 4 No.3).Participants affirmed the visual design, "It's an interesting experience that wouldn't be available in a hotel" (P5) while engaging with the interpretation of the animation, "I think the black ball represents me" (P6).At the same time, guests questioned the repetitive play, "I can only watch the animation each time and I can't skip it" (P1) and "I don't want it to play the animation every time" (P6).They also expressed a need for more personalization, "I would like to see more information"(P5), which explains why five participants tried to click on the screen to explore further."The animation does not reflect personalization, such as my or the landlord's characteristics" (P9).
Physical Concept: Hanging Hook Our physical design has the lowest score on pragmatic quality (0.75), but shows an outstanding advantage on hedonic quality (1.57).Physical design has been a less practically studied segment of smart accommodation research, which opens up new ideas for smart systems to improve hedonic quality.In terms of details, physical design appears polarized: stimulation (1.42) and novelty (1.73) have more advantages, while perspicuity (1.29), efficiency (0.85), and dependability (0.1) are the lowest among the three modalities, with dependability is the weakest.The emergence of physical design in Airbnb has impacted participants' perceptions, and while we see advantages, we also The physical design had excellent feedback in terms of stimulation and novelty while falling well below the good mark in benchmarks in terms of dependability (see figure 4 No.4).While participants unanimously expressed the novelty of the physics, they also expressed their concern from various aspects: the important reason for feeling out of control is that the physical design is outside of the daily practice, "Does everything in this room move without thinking about it?(P8), they habitually associate movement with the function "I don't know if it's reminding me of something" (P5), the physical design expresses limited information "I don't know what to say, I don't get any information" (P8), "the physical design in I don't see that it's welcoming for me" (P13).Finally, participants also generally responded that the noise generated by the current model-driven experience had an impact on the experience.

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS
We learned about the effectiveness of these modalities' designs in conveying the theme of welcome from the interviews.The screen was rated as the design that best conveyed a sense of welcome, most likely because the screen clearly detailed the names of the guests while the animation showed the word "welcome".The physical design's sense of welcome was generally rated lower for two possible reasons: 1) There was no explicit symbol of welcome in the physical design, only the butterfly as a friendly metaphor.2) People subconsciously associate physical design with functional information rather than simply moving for the sake of movement.As an example, the emotional exploration of welcome highlights the various advantages of different modalities in creating an emotional atmosphere, which will inspire our subsequent expressions in multi-modality contexts.
In this initial exploration, we likewise found design considerations for smart technology in the context of smart accommodation: Ubiquitous Systematic Modalities Currently, the interactive experience in different locations is relatively independent, and guests expect the modality to cooperate with each other and have better correlation, and eventually they expect a welcome experience from the overall smart system."I would be a little confused about where to start the experience" (P5) "I need a moving line, all the current designs would attract me at the same time" (P9) "... My attention is being pulled away by the sound" (P11).Guests try to connect the devices "The swing of the butterfly is telling me that all the smart devices are ready" (P11).The coordination of actions between multiple devices has also been focused on by previous scholars (i.e., [8,10]), How can modalities in different locations in the space be linked to enhance the overall smart Airbnb experience?
Multimodality in a Single Device In the case of the butterfly device, for example, guests expect the addition of sound and lighting to make the experience of the device more authentic.Guests want to combine the physical movements of the butterfly with other modalities to understand the message while expressing different levels of information through the combination of these modalities."Butterflies can have some sounds appear" (P14) "Butterflies don't have to move every time, they can use lights the second time" (P6).What is the impact of the different modalities on the guest when interacting with the same device?How should these modalities be sequenced to enhance the guest experience?
Privacy Concerns Automation and personalization have raised privacy concerns for guests, such as "I think it's insecure to know my name" (P7), "why is it monitoring my location in real-time?"(P2)"I didn't input information, why does it know so much about me?"(P10).Guests need to understand how their behavior is being captured and where the personalized information is coming from.Therefore, smart experiences should consider guests' concerns about intelligence while pursuing personalization, which has been similarly focused on by scholars such as Mare et al(i.e.[27]) before, and we further reflect on: how to avoid guests' fear of omnipresent sensors?How can the process of data collection by Airbnb be transparently presented to guests?
Experience Changes Over Time As mentioned by the host during the previous co-design process, guests in the field test doubted the repetition of the welcome gesture.They reflected on the motivation for each welcome gesture and felt that in subsequent multiple encounters, the system should present a different form of welcome depending on the season, time of day, and individual guest characteristics."Repeating the same action every time I go over makes me wonder" (P6) "I expect the screen information to change with time and season" (P8).In fact, in our guest experience survey, we found that our guests' understanding of Airbnb changes as their stay [5], and that constant experience support will leave guests bored.How do smart devices adjust the form of interaction when they have multiple encounters with guests?
We conducted an exploratory empirical study with Airbnb guests to investigate how they understand welcoming actions from different modalities.Future work will improve the current design and provide insight into these design considerations that need to be addressed.

Figure 1 : 1 .
Figure 1: 1. Bespoke booklet hosting design proposals and feedback from the hosts.2.An example of physical interaction: Welcome Butterfly.3.An example of visual interaction: Welcome Frame.4.An example of sound interactions: Welcome Staircase.

Figure 4 : 1 .
Figure 4: 1.Comparison of sound, visual and physical design in terms of pragmatic and hedonic qualities.2.The sound concept in benchmarks.3. Visual concept in benchmarks.4. Physical concept in benchmarks.