ABSTRACT Despite advancements in artificial intelligence, machine translation's impact on tourism remains underexplored. Leveraging Communication Accommodation Theory, we investigated the following research questions from the hotel's perspective: (a) How is machine translation used in service encounters in high‐end hotels in Lisbon and Barcelona? (b) How does machine translation impact communication accommodation (both cognitive and affective) in these hotels? Adopting a qualitative multi‐method approach, we conducted 37 semi‐structured interviews with experts, hotel directors, and hotel front‐office staff in Lisbon and Barcelona. We propose a framework to illustrate how machine translation affects cognitive and affective accommodation, how cognitive and affective accommodation affect each other, and how front‐office staff use communication strategies to compensate for machine translation limitations. We conclude that machine translation is a valuable tool for hotels but not a replacement for language skills.
Carvalho et al. (Sun,) studied this question.