Technology Implementation in Hotel Guest-Facing Operations: A Comparative Case Study of Frontline Employee Perspectives

Sammanfattning

The hospitality sector is facing a digital transformation that is reshaping service delivery, and personalization and the guest experience are key areas affected by this. Although research on digital transformation and digital adoption in hospitality is growing, employees' experiences during the early stages of implementation of digital tools remain underexplored. This study explores how front-line employees perceive the early stage of implementation of a digital guest experience tool at three hotels within a Nordic hotel group. Specifically, it examines what opportunities and challenges arise in its adoption. The study adopts a qualitative and comparative multiple-case design, based on 13 semi structured interviews conducted with front-line staff at the reception desks of the three hotels, as well as the hotel group’s central management. The findings reveal that the tool was viewed as operationally useful and that it had the potential to contribute to both personalization and guest loyalty. At the same time, consistent and preference-based use had not yet been achieved. The challenges and gaps that emerged in relation to the tool were not explained by the tool itself, but rather due to insufficient enabling conditions, such as training, communication, and operational alignment, which left employees underprepared. Notably, the maturity of adoption did not correlate with implementation time, as the hotel with the longest implementation period showed a similar level of adoption to those that had implemented it more recently. The study concludes that the success of such an implementation depends less on its technical capabilities and time, and more on the organizational and operational conditions surrounding it. This study contributes to the understanding of frontline employees’ experiences during the early stages of implementing a digital tool in the hospitality industry, a phase and viewpoint that is stillunderexplored in existing literature. In addition, it provides practical insights for hotel operators and the rest of the hospitality industry.