Retraction notice: Screens, stays and serenity: how smart hotel technologies shape digital wellbeing, experiential value and loyalty in Southeast Asia's tourism hotspots

The publisher of Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights wishes to retract the article Ali Mari M, Ahmad W (2026), “Screens, stays and serenity: how smart hotel technologies shape digital wellbeing, experiential value and loyalty in Southeast Asia's tourism hotspots”. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JHTI-09-2025-1113. It has come to our attention that there are concerns regarding the authorship of the article; an investigation was conducted to verify its provenance and evidence of its composition was requested. The authors cooperated fully but failed to address the concerns identified sufficiently. As a result, the article's findings cannot be relied upon. Emerald's authorship policy guidelines make it clear that authorship is a fundamental aspect of transparency in the publication process and ensures accountability and responsibility for reported research. Further, the authors and the article did not comply with the requirements for ethical research practices involving human subjects. Specifically, that human subjects data reported in this publication were collected without approval from UCSI University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia as is otherwise described in the text, that no such approval was provided by the institution, and that the documents provided by the authors purporting to illustrate this are not genuine: “This study received institutional ethics approval from the UCSI University Institutional Review Board (Ref: UCSI-FBM-REC-2025/017)”. The Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Insights author guidelines make it clear that authors have an ethical obligation and responsibility to conduct their research in adherence to national and international research ethics guidelines, as well as the ethical principles outlined by their discipline and any relevant authorities, and to be transparent about their research methods in such a way that all involved in the publication process may fairly and appropriately evaluate the work. The decision to retract has been informed by COPE's guidelines on retractions and Emerald's publishing ethics. While Emerald's authorship criteria emphasizes that all listed authors are ultimately accountable for all aspects of a work's accuracy and integrity, it should, however, be noted that following a subsequent investigation by UCSI University, the co-author Wasim Ahmad was found to be unaware that the required ethics approval had not been obtained and was instead fabricated. The authors of this article would like to note that they do not agree with the content of this notice. The publisher of the journal sincerely apologizes to the readers.