The purpose of this paper is to share operational insights for managers and leaders in post-pandemic hospitality organizations, particularly related to the integration of technology and how these impact both customers and frontline customer service employees.
Using long-term autoethnographic methods, the author worked as an employee. This allowed insight into operational and organizational difficulties with regard to use of self-service technologies, interactions between customers and employees and the relationship between these.
Overall, the use of self-service technology for online booking and buying of hospitality services accelerated during the pandemic and solidified in the post-pandemic era. There has not been commensurate attention to how this impacts customer experience, the new gaps between where and when service is offered to customers and the negative impact this has on employee–customer interactions. All of this contributes to the industry’s ongoing struggles with low employee morale and difficulties with employee recruitment and retention.
This research occurred in one hospitality organization, but the findings have potential for portability to other hospitality and tourism organizations.
The paper offers many suggestions for more effective management of hospitality operations. Matching service to when and where customer engage in booking and buying better meets customer needs and offers flexible work options for employees. Further, supporting customers through their use of self-service technology is an important aspect of post-pandemic service.
This paper provides actionable insights to hospitality managers and leaders to re-vision customer service in the post-pandemic period in order to better serve their customers and more effectively support their workers, while reducing friction between them. The suggestions provided can be put into practice immediately in order to address staffing challenges within hospitality organizations.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic led to mass layoffs in hospitality organizations, and the industry has struggled to recover, particularly in terms of staffing. Headlines decry the dearth of workers across the hospitality industry, and hospitality organizations curtailing operations have become the norm. Within this landscape, there is increased demand for hospitality services, even exceeding pre-pandemic levels.
In March 2025, the United States hospitality industry finally fully rebounded above 2020 levels, with nearly 17 million jobs (Sandle, 2025). Consumer demand for hospitality is stronger than ever, yet the industry struggles with hiring (American Hospitality & Lodging Association, 2025). Even with increases in wages, restaurants, hotels and other hospitality organizations struggle to recruit and retain the workers needed to fit customer demand for their services (Kirk, 2024). The industry has tried to improve pay that will retain workers. Nonetheless, the stress, burnout and low morale of post-pandemic hospitality work make employees unwilling to join or stay in the industry (Mũrage, Travis, & Smith, 2024; Reiner, 2025). The unstable and insufficient labor force continues to be a major problem with a hospitality industry that shows opportunity for growth.
Against this discontinuity between the supply of customer service workers and the demand for hospitality services, the last five years have also been characterized by the widespread adoption of self-service and online technologies for everything from ordering take-out from restaurants to getting groceries delivered. At its annual meeting, the National Restaurant Association acknowledged that “automation and AI are redefining frontline work … these tools are being positioned to remove friction and empower employees” (Sung, 2025). The post-pandemic downturn in hospitality hiring and retention, coupled with industry changes—such as online booking and check-in, fewer in-person complimentary services (such as housekeeping and meals), as well as self-service technology for customers to order and access amenities—have become permanent.
The increasingly widespread use of self-service technologies (SSTs) offers both job demands and job resources to customers, who are now able to book and buy desired services on their own. Prior to the introduction of SSTs, this was work traditionally done by customer service employees. While technology seems to offer customers convenience, accessibility and control, it also shifts the burden of labor from the organization to the customer. Further, in times of crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic, “Job demands, such as work pressure and demanding customers, exhaust the energy of employees and consequently diminish their health, whereas job resources, such as autonomy and social support, help employees to deal with the demands and to develop themselves” (Demerouti & Bakker, 2023). This perspective helps frame the challenges of post-pandemic service work. In particular, the way that SSTs were implemented created a mismatch in what service consumers need (demands) and what resources (human and otherwise) organizations, and their workers, have to meet those demands.
While SSTs seem to offer hospitality organization savings in terms of labor, in practice it created additional job demands with fewer job resources, both in terms of staffing and policies and practices for dealing with self-service technology issues (Bakker & Demerouti, 2024). This is because employees were called upon to solve service mistakes and failures created by customers’ use of SSTs. These were systems to which they often did not have access and/or control, and employees were often introduced into the service interaction only after a service mistake or failure, often days or weeks later.
This combination of workforce staffing challenges with changes in how services are provisioned to customers in hospitality settings is not necessarily complementary. This means that it is urgent to understand how human and technological elements of customer service interplay within the frontline interactions between staff and guests in hospitality. In order to do this, I engaged in more than two years of ethnographic study as a part-time hospitality worker at a ski resort in the northeastern United States. During this time, I worked 7–9 hour shifts more than 40 days per season, working at some of the busiest time including over Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidents’ Day long weekends and school vacation weeks. During this time, I took field notes at the end of each shift, chronicling experiences, emotions and interactions that my customer service role entailed.
Throughout the years that I was on staff, I formed close working relationships and, eventually, friendships with other staff members, many of whom worked full-time and had pre-pandemic experience in these roles. They shared their observations as well, which were included in my field notes. At the conclusion of each season, I engaged in comprehensive coding of my field notes. In addition, I checked my insights in the paper through ongoing conversation with work colleagues about the patterns and insights that I identified through analysis of my field notes, to ensure it resonated with their perspectives.
Over the course of two seasons of data collection, I observed how online self-service technology was now integrated into the in-person interactions customer service employees had with customers at the resort (Cole, 2025). In this paper, I show how poor integration between self-service and in-person service undermines both customer and employee experience in hospitality settings.
Key findings
Based on my study of frontline customer service work in an outdoor recreation and hospitality organization, the post-pandemic context is challenging in terms of the customer demands, supply of workers and relationships between human and technological elements of customer service. My research showed that the hospitality industry has not yet developed an appreciation of how these technological tools and their use amplified and adopted as a normal part of business practices, impacted in-person customer service interactions and therefore the experiences of employees and customers.
Because of this, these tools were not well integrated with in-person customer service. As a result, the use of online SSTs in the post-pandemic hospitality industry did not decrease employee stress or improve customer experience. Rather, the haphazard combination of new technologies with extant, pre-pandemic assumptions and norms for customer service created more work for the customer, less agency for customer service workers and more conflict in frontline interactions between them.
With the persistent post-pandemic demand for hospitality and tourism and understaffing in these industries, organizations and their leaders need to address and respond to ensure satisfied customers and adequate staffing. Pandemic-era changes in hospitality practices are usually adopted to decrease the need for service employees and to save the organization money. What my research illustrates is that these savings come at a cost, in terms of both customer experience and employee wellbeing, which only exacerbates the problems of customer dissatisfaction and persistent understaffing in the hospitality industry.
Actionable insights
In this section, I offer key insights that derive from my long-term ethnographic study of customer service, with an eye toward how hospitality leaders and managers can better support their employees and ensure customers that are engaged and satisfied.
The adoption of online and self-service technology has become the norm in post-pandemic hospitality and tourism, and organizational practices must evolve to match this reality.
While online booking for hospitality is not required, it is often the only way customers can ensure they have access to the activities and services they desire when they arrive. This means that organizations should identify how frontline service work and customer experience are impacted by the adoption of online SSTs, which affects how customers arrive to and behave during in-person service interactions. First and foremost, organizations need to revisit their understanding of what customer service entails in this new online, self-service environment, which is now the norm within the hospitality industry.
- (2)
Service failure should be expected with the adoption and use of these new technologies, and organizational practices should both anticipate and respond to these failures.
When hospitality organizations deploy online and SSTs for booking and buying, they should expect both technologies to fail and customers to struggle with adopting and using it successfully. As these online and SSTs serve as the beginning of a customer’s buying journey with the hospitality organization, it must plan to both prevent and respond to situations where technologies do not work correctly and when customers were successful in its application.
- (3)
With the advent of online and SSTs as the primary starting point of the customer buying journey, this substantially changes the quality and quantity of subsequent in-person customer service interactions.
My research showed that where, when and how customers book and buy hospitality services have changed and solidified in this post-pandemic era. Because of this move to online, self-service and digital products, at the ski area where I conducted my research, tickets, ski lessons and even food in the lodge could be secured through one’s phone, without ever having to engage with a member of the customer service staff.
However, as noted in the previous section, it was not uncommon for a customer to fail or be only partially successful in securing the services they wanted through the use of these technologies. Thus, in-person interactions with customer service personnel on the ground at the hospitality organization were now largely driven by failure and dissatisfaction—rather than the completion of a successful and satisfying transaction. As a result, while there may be fewer number of customers with whom an on-site hospitality employee may need to interact with during any given shift, a higher percentage of these customers arrive to these frontline interactions having already experienced a service failure.
- (4)
This means that these technologies have a particularly negative impact on frontline employees, while also encouraging customer misbehavior.
Extant research shows that customers tend to blame employees, rather than the technologies or themselves, for service failures (Belanche, Casaló, Flavián, & Schepers, 2020; Zhu, Nakata, Sivakumar, & Grewal, 2013). In my research, these employees received negative feedback during service interactions as well as in post-visit surveys, because of problems that arose from use of SSTs. Customers would often negatively assess the helpfulness and/or competence of employees who did not have the resources to help customers who arrived with failed SST interactions. These negatively valenced interactions and feedback had a deleterious effect on the well-being, morale and retention of frontline customer service employees.
Real-world examples: enacting actionable insights
In this section, I offer examples of how hospitality organizations and managers could translate the above insights into concrete practices that impact both customer and employee experiences in online and in-person customer service.
Work with stakeholders to identify how frontline service work and customer experience have been impacted by the adoption of online SSTs.
First and foremost, organizations need to transform their understanding of what customer service entails in this new online, self-service environment that is now the norm within the hospitality industry. Organizations must engage with, and listen to, their customers and employees in order to discover what is working well and for which customers. Stakeholders can articulate what the pain points, define what timely, effective service entails and determine how to adapt pre-pandemic organizational norms to post-pandemic realities. This will improve how customers arrive to and behave in in-person interactions and employees’ overall morale and likelihood to persist in their roles.
In order to learn and use customers’ and employees’ perspectives, organizations need to move beyond post-purchase surveys and exit interviews. Here are a number of ways that organizations can engage with their customers and employees for actionable insights.
Have managers and leaders shadow employees in their day-to-day to work of frontline customer service;
Have managers and leaders engage in the buying process from online to engaging in the service purchased;
Ask employees at end of shift or end of the week to provide insight into the issues that customers brought to them as well as the challenges they had in providing effective service;
Offer employees the same post-visit and NetPromoter surveys offered to customers in order to evaluate management and organizational practices;
Engage customers and employees in ongoing, engaged conversation about what is working well and what areas need to be addressed for them to remain loyal and committed to the organization.
I was able to identify the issues that customer service workers faced through long-term, ethnographic immersion in a hospitality organization. Similarly, being present, observant and engaged in an ongoing way is the most valuable way that managers and leaders can learn from their employees and customers about how to improve and transform the organization in this post-pandemic period.
Offer commensurate customer support for when and where customers need service.
The default to on-site, in-person service during operating hours reflects the hospitality industry’s pre-pandemic norms. In practice, how customers book and buy hospitality products and services has changed substantially in the last six years. Because customers now have 24/7 access to online booking, my research clearly demonstrated that offering online booking with only on-site customer service was a tangible, impactful mismatch between organizational staffing and customer needs.
The service hospitality organizations provide to customers should begin as soon as they navigate to their website and e-commerce pages. This is where organizations need to do more to match their staffing with how online technologies impact customer experience. There are a number of ways that hospitality organizations can better meet the needs of customers through their buying journeys:
e-mail and web communications focused on online booking and buying;
free work stations on-site with internet access;
video tutorials;
online how-tos and FAQs;
virtual customer service support.
Meeting customers’ need for support and services when and where they are booking (nights and weekends, online) allows hospitality organizations to prevent and address service failures before customers arrive to in-person service interactions. This would reduce the number of service interactions that are predicated on failure and frustration, thus improving both customer and employee experience. There is a desire for greater remote and flexible work options for employees within the hospitality industry, which often requires roles that are fully in-person. Across nine industries highlighted by the United States Chamber of Commerce (2025), hospitality had the highest rate of full on-site work expectations, which contributes to the industry’s inability to recruit and retain workers. Allowing remote and hybrid work options to support customers’ use of online SST offers flexibility that workers desire while also offering better service support for customers when they need it, well before in-person service interactions. This is a win for employees, customers and the organizations that serve them.
Identifying how service needs have changed (1) and providing service when and where it is needed (2) offer a third way to develop organizational practices that align with this new normal of customer service needs.
Articulate roles and responsibilities in this new service landscape, for both customers and employees.
Within the hospitality industry, the use of online and SSTs was under way prior to 2020, and the pandemic accelerated its widespread adoption. The ubiquity of these technologies has become permanent in the post-pandemic hospitality landscape. As a result, leaders should proactively define expectations for customer behavior. This would ensure high levels of guest satisfaction, while also protecting employees and thus supporting their retention. This is particularly important in the hospitality industry that, in the aftermath of the pandemic, continues to struggle with adequate staffing. Examples of how to do this include:
adequately supporting customers through online and self-service buying and booking processes to decrease service failures and customer frustration;
setting customer expectations about the relationship between online and in-person customer service (who is responsible for online service failures; what services can and cannot be provided in person or online, etc.);
defining what customer behaviors will (and will not) be tolerated in service interactions, with clear (loss of services, seasonal or permanent ban from the organization, etc.)
In a time when workers desire more opportunity for hybrid work arrangement, the post-pandemic restructuring of where and how hospitality organizations offer services to their customers is an opportunity that leaders and managers should not overlook.
Conclusion
While the hospitality industry does not, on the surface, look substantially different than it did in 2020, my research shows that there have been radical changes to when and where service interactions happen, who participates and in what role(s) and how this has altered both the substance and tenor of in-person customer service in post-pandemic hospitality. In other words, the nature of frontline customer service has shifted dramatically. Organizations have failed to properly train and equip employees with the tools, processes and skills to be successful, which contribute to burnout of customer service workers, both new and experienced.
As hospitality leaders and managers continue to struggle with post-pandemic staffing – both recruitment and retention – it is important to reckon with how technology on its own does not allow the industry to bridge its personnel gaps. Further, it is important to recognize when and how technology itself, while providing savings and efficiencies in some areas of hiring and customer service, is the cause of customer dissatisfaction and misbehavior, as well as negative employee satisfaction and morale.
In addressing both employee and customer experience in the post-pandemic service landscape in hospitality, better integration of online and in-person service will provide the opportunity for better outcomes for customers, employees and organizations. In doing so, organizations have the opportunity to better meet the needs of current and future customers, reckon with roadblocks to employee recruitment and retention and build stronger hospitality organizations that meet the post-pandemic moment and are prepared to thrive in it.
