There’s a moment in many modern hotels that feels oddly dislocating. You glide through the lobby, phone in hand, doors opening before you touch them. No queue. No forms. No awkward small talk. It’s efficient, even elegant.
And then – if something goes wrong – you realise something else is missing.
Not speed.
Not technology.
But someone.
This tension sits at the heart of hospitality’s next chapter. Automation is solving real problems: labour shortages, language barriers, guest impatience, cost pressure. But as hotels, airports, attractions, and destinations accelerate toward frictionless design, a quieter question is surfacing beneath the dashboards and pilot programs:
At what point does frictionless become soulless?
The emotional anchor: human warmth still matters
In recent consumer research, tourism scholar Fu surfaces something deceptively simple: people want technology to remove tasks, not humans. Automation is welcomed when it clears obstacles. It’s resisted when it erases warmth.
That distinction matters because it cuts through a false binary that still dominates industry thinking. The choice isn’t “high-tech” versus “high-touch.” The real challenge is far more precise:
Which moments can be automated without emotional cost – and which moments are the emotional experience?
This is the hospitality threshold.
Cross it thoughtfully, and technology amplifies care.
Cross it blindly, and the experience hollows out.
The hospitality threshold sits at the point where a guest’s emotional state shifts from functional to vulnerable. On one side, efficiency helps. On the other, efficiency harms. The skill isn’t choosing technology or humanity – it’s recognising when the threshold has been crossed.
Why the industry keeps misreading the problem
Hospitality didn’t set out to remove humanity. It backed into it.
The pressures are structural. Labour shortages are persistent, not cyclical. Guest expectations are shaped by apps that work instantly, everywhere, all the time. Margins are thin. Training is expensive. Turnover is high.
Into this environment stepped automation with a compelling promise: do more with fewer people, and do it consistently. Self-check-in kiosks don’t call in sick. Chatbots don’t forget policies. Translation tools don’t get flustered.
The mistake isn’t using these tools. It’s assuming efficiency and experience are the same thing.
They’re not.
Efficiency is about throughput.
Hospitality is about emotional state.
When those get conflated, organisations start automating moments that were never just tasks in the first place.
Hospitality isn’t a journey. It’s a sequence of emotional states.
Hospitality is often modelled as a linear journey: search ? book ? arrive ? stay ? depart.
But guests don’t experience journeys. They experience moments, each with a distinct emotional need.
Seen this way, the question sharpens. Not “where can we remove people?” but:
What is the guest feeling right now – and what kind of response does that feeling require?
Across sectors, four moments consistently sit on the human side of the threshold:
- Welcome
- Recovery
- Reassurance
- Delight
Everything else is negotiable.
Welcome: orientation, not logistics
Why welcome matters
A welcome isn’t about check-in. It’s about orientation.
Guests arrive carrying uncertainty: Have I chosen the right place? Am I welcome here? Do I belong in this space? Even confident travellers feel it, if only faintly.
A tired couple arrives late after a delayed flight. The app works perfectly. The door opens. But there’s no one to glance up and say, “Long day – you’re in the right place.” The efficiency lands. The relief doesn’t.
A phone unlocking a door can be impressive. But it cannot read hesitation. It cannot soften anxiety. It cannot signal permission in the way a human presence can – even a minimal one.
This doesn’t mean every guest needs a long chat at reception. But it does mean someone must be available, visible, and emotionally fluent at the point of arrival.
Welcome is not a process. It’s a relationship opening.
Automate the paperwork. Keep the presence.
Recovery: where trust is either earned or lost for good
Why recovery must stay human
If there is one moment that should never be fully automated, it’s recovery.
Flights are delayed. Rooms aren’t ready. Bookings glitch. Keys fail. Plans collapse.
A guest stands in the lobby after midnight, phone buzzing with cancellation alerts, being told by a screen that policy doesn’t allow compensation. The information is accurate. The experience is unforgivable.
In these moments, guests aren’t looking for information. They’re looking for containment. Someone to acknowledge the disruption, take responsibility, and signal that the situation is being held.
Chatbots are excellent at policy delivery.
They are terrible at moral repair.
A scripted apology delivered by a screen can feel insulting precisely because it’s efficient. It tells the guest: your inconvenience has been processed.
Human recovery does something different. It restores dignity. It reframes the problem as relational rather than procedural.
If something has gone wrong, a human must appear early – not eventually.
Reassurance: when information isn’t the real request
Why reassurance is about care, not data
Some travellers are anxious. Some are tired. Some are elderly, ill, grieving, or simply overwhelmed.
They don’t always announce this. It shows up indirectly: repeated questions, hesitations, small requests.
An older guest asks the same question three times about breakfast. The system answers correctly each time. What it doesn’t notice is fear – of getting it wrong, of being a burden, of feeling foolish in an unfamiliar place.
Automation is efficient at answering questions. It’s poor at recognising why the question is being asked.
Reassurance isn’t about data. It’s about tone, pacing, and the subtle restoration of safety. A human can slow down. A system can’t – unless explicitly instructed, and even then imperfectly.
If a guest is asking for certainty, they may actually be asking for care.
Delight: the moments that turn service into memory
Why delight can’t be automated
Delight doesn’t scale cleanly.
A staff member notices a guest sketching in the café and quietly suggests a lesser-known gallery nearby. No algorithm planned it. No prompt triggered it. The moment lingers long after checkout.
A perfectly timed suggestion. A remembered preference. A small, generous deviation from script. These aren’t efficiencies; they’re gifts.
Technology can support delight – by surfacing information, freeing staff time, or prompting ideas. But the act itself is human. It involves judgement, intuition, and context that resists standardisation.
Many organisations automate delight first, mistaking novelty for warmth. These moments can amuse. They rarely move.
True delight happens when a guest feels seen, not impressed.
What can be automated – safely, even gratefully
Once the human moments are protected, the rest opens up.
Guests are generally happy to automate:
- Booking and payment
- Check-in and check-out logistics
- Key access
- Standard information requests
- Wayfinding
- Language translation
- Routine service requests
- Scheduling and reminders
Automating these often improves hospitality by removing friction that exhausts both guests and staff.
The red flag is simple: if automation prevents a guest from being seen at a moment of vulnerability, it has crossed the threshold.
The Hospitality Threshold: quick diagnostic
Use this as a test
Automate:
- logistics
- transactions
- information
Keep human:
- welcome
- recovery
- reassurance
- delight
Red flag:
- any moment where efficiency replaces dignity
The quiet risk: mistaking silence for success
One of the most dangerous feedback loops in hospitality is silence.
When automation replaces human contact, complaints often decrease – not because experiences improved, but because expectations were lowered. Guests stop asking. They stop engaging. They adapt.
Metrics look good. Return visits quietly fall.
This is how soullessness creeps in: not with outrage, but with resignation.
The better question for leaders
Instead of asking, “Where can we remove people?” a better question is:
Where does a human presence change how a guest feels about themselves?
If the answer is “not at all,” automate freely.
If the answer is “it restores dignity, confidence, or trust,” pause.
The hospitality threshold isn’t ideological. It’s diagnostic.
Friction isn’t the enemy
Hospitality has always involved a delicate balance between effort and care. Some friction – waiting, asking, interacting – isn’t a flaw. It’s how relationships form.
The danger isn’t friction.
The danger is removing friction without noticing what it was doing.
A perfectly frictionless experience can still fail at hospitality. Not because it breaks, but because it never quite reaches the guest at all. As systems get smarter, the risk isn’t that we automate too much – it’s that we automate the moments that mattered, and only realise it when people stop coming back. Quietly. Politely. Without complaint.
Technology will keep advancing. Interfaces will get smoother. Systems will get smarter. None of that is reversible, nor should it be.
But hospitality still has a choice.
It can become a perfectly functioning system that never quite makes people feel welcome.
Or it can treat technology as scaffolding – holding the structure steady while humans do the work only humans can do.
The difference lies at the threshold.
