Saas-Driven Service Architectures And Experiential Value Co-Creation In Digitally Mediated Hospitality Ecosystems

Abstract

The contemporary hospitality industry is undergoing a profound transformation driven by cloud computing, platformization, and the diffusion of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business models. These shifts have not merely digitized existing service processes but have reconstituted the very ontological foundations of hospitality by reconfiguring relationships among guests, employees, intermediaries, and service infrastructures. This article develops a comprehensive theoretical and empirical framework for understanding how SaaS-driven architectures mediate experiential value co-creation in hospitality ecosystems characterized by platform labor, real-time service personalization, and digitally orchestrated trust. Building on the service-dominant logic tradition and extending recent hospitality-specific theorization, this study situates SaaS not as a neutral technological artifact but as a socio-technical regime that redistributes agency, risk, and meaning across stakeholders. Central to this argument is the recognition that cloud-based hospitality platforms increasingly replace human concierges, front-desk staff, and even managerial discretion with algorithmically mediated service flows, a process critically examined by Goel’s theorization of hospitality’s transition from concierge-centric to cloud-centric experiences (Goel, 2025).

Using an interpretive, multi-layered qualitative synthesis of prior empirical findings across SaaS adoption, service quality, gig-based service provision, and electronic trust, this article constructs a conceptual results narrative demonstrating how SaaS reshapes perceived service quality, word-of-mouth diffusion, and guest loyalty through infrastructural invisibility and interface-level intimacy. Methodologically, the study adopts a hermeneutic meta-analysis of extant hospitality and information systems research, integrating insights from cloud ERP adoption, e-service quality, and platform labor studies. The findings suggest that SaaS does not simply enhance operational efficiency but fundamentally alters the phenomenology of hospitality by embedding expectations of immediacy, personalization, and procedural justice into digital interfaces.

The discussion elaborates how SaaS-mediated hospitality produces new paradoxes of trust and precarity: while guests experience heightened reliability and transparency, service workers embedded in gig-like operational models face intensified vulnerability and algorithmic surveillance. These tensions are theorized through protection motivation theory and social commerce dynamics, revealing how guest satisfaction is increasingly contingent upon both visible service quality and invisible labor conditions. By weaving together SaaS security discourses, platform strategy, and experiential marketing, the article advances a unified theory of cloud-mediated hospitality value. The conclusion positions SaaS not merely as a technological enabler but as the core institutional logic of future hospitality, calling for ethically informed governance and experience-centered platform design.