From Algorithms to Amenities: Mapping the Path from AI Adoption to Guest Experience and Satisfaction in Hospitality

This study maps how hotel-level artificial intelligence (AI) adoption diffuses through three guest-facing technologies—chatbots, augmented-reality (AR) applications, and virtual influencers (VIs)—to shape guest experience and, ultimately, post-stay satisfaction. Guided by the stimulus–organism–response framework, AI adoption is modelled as the stimulus, the three AI touchpoints as organisms, and guest experience and satisfaction as sequential responses. Data were collected from 300 Generation Y/Z travellers who had interacted with at least one AI touchpoint during a recent hotel stay. The model was tested with partial least-squares structural-equation modelling (SmartPLS 4), using a two-step measurement-and-structural approach and bias-corrected bootstrapping. AI adoption strongly enhances the perceived quality of chatbots, AR and VIs. AR exerts the largest positive effect on guest experience and produces the strongest serial indirect impact on satisfaction. VI effectiveness also improves experience and, via experience, satisfaction. In contrast, chatbot quality shows a small negative effect on experience and no significant indirect path to satisfaction, revealing an empathy gap despite technical competence. Guest experience remains the pivotal conduit to satisfaction. Hotels should prioritise immersive AR rollouts, use VIs as narrative enhancers, and redesign chatbots with empathetic scripts and human hand-offs to recover experiential warmth. This research provides the first multi-touchpoint serial-mediation test linking AI capability to experiential and evaluative outcomes in hospitality and empirically documents conditions under which conversational AI can harm rather than help the guest journey.