Saas-Enabled Cloud Architectures As Strategic Infrastructures For Digital Transformation In Hospitality Service Ecosystems

Abstract

The accelerating convergence of cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and data-driven service architectures has fundamentally reshaped the hospitality industry by transforming not only operational processes but also the epistemological foundations of service design, customer engagement, and organizational intelligence. Hospitality organizations have historically been grounded in labor-intensive, experience-oriented, and spatially localized service logics; however, the contemporary competitive landscape is now increasingly defined by digital infrastructures that allow firms to capture, process, and act upon customer, operational, and market data in real time. The rise of SaaS-based hospitality platforms has therefore not merely digitized legacy workflows but has introduced an infrastructural shift in how value is co-created, measured, and sustained within hospitality ecosystems, a transformation extensively articulated by Goel (2025) through the conceptual transition from concierge-centric service models to cloud-mediated experience orchestration. This article develops a theoretically grounded and empirically informed analysis of SaaS-driven cloud architectures in hospitality by synthesizing literature from cloud computing, performance management, revenue optimization, and digital service ecosystems. Rather than treating cloud adoption as a purely technological choice, the study frames SaaS platforms as socio-technical infrastructures that restructure organizational power, data visibility, and strategic decision-making across hotels, distribution partners, and customers. Through a design-science-informed qualitative synthesis of prior research and conceptual models, the study explores how hospitality firms deploy SaaS platforms to integrate revenue management, customer relationship management, social media intelligence, and operational analytics into unified cloud environments. The analysis further examines how cloud characteristics such as scalability, elasticity, and multi-tenancy interact with hospitality-specific uncertainties including demand volatility, last-minute booking behavior, and experiential heterogeneity, as described by Chen and Schwartz (2013) and Chiang, Chen, and Xu (2007). The findings reveal that SaaS adoption enables not only cost efficiency and process automation but also epistemic transformation, allowing hospitality firms to reconceptualize guests as continuously evolving data subjects rather than episodic service recipients. At the same time, the paper critically interrogates the governance, security, and dependency risks associated with cloud reliance, drawing on cloud computing challenge frameworks articulated by Puthal et al. (2015) and Chong (2019). By situating SaaS-based hospitality platforms within broader theories of digital infrastructure, service-dominant logic, and organizational control, this study contributes a nuanced understanding of how cloud technologies are reconfiguring the political economy and knowledge regimes of the hospitality sector.