The hospitality industry has historically been positioned at the intersection of technological innovation and human-centered service delivery, yet the rapid acceleration of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, artificial intelligence, and cloud-based infrastructures has redefined the ontological foundations of hospitality work, guest experience, and organizational value creation (Sheldon, 1983; Buhalis, 2020). In recent years, hospitality ecosystems have increasingly migrated from fragmented, property-bound information systems toward platformized service architectures that enable real-time data integration, algorithmic personalization, and distributed service orchestration, thereby challenging classical notions of front-stage and back-stage service labor (Law et al., 2009; Li et al., 2021). This transformation is not merely technical but deeply socio-economic, as digital infrastructures now mediate customer relationships, brand perception, employee identity, and customer retention trajectories in unprecedented ways (Ang & Buttle, 2006; Almohaimmeed, 2019). The present study advances a comprehensive, theory-driven analysis of how SaaS-enabled hospitality platforms reconfigure customer retention dynamics through the integration of customer relationship management, artificial intelligence, internal marketing, and service automation. Drawing on a synthesized corpus of hospitality, marketing, and information systems scholarship, this research situates SaaS not simply as an operational efficiency tool but as a strategic epistemology of service governance that reshapes how hospitality firms learn about, interact with, and retain their customers (Campbell et al., 2020; Goel, 2025).

Central to this argument is the proposition that SaaS-based hospitality platforms operate as relational infrastructures that convert guest interactions into persistent data assets, enabling continuous refinement of service personalization, loyalty formation, and emotional attachment to brands (Ascarza et al., 2018; Anabila & Awunyo-Vitor, 2013). Unlike traditional property management systems that focused on transactional recordkeeping, contemporary SaaS ecosystems integrate conversational AI, digital twins, cloud-based CRM, and real-time analytics into a unified experiential interface that aligns customer expectations with organizational responsiveness (Boonstra, 2021; Crowe, 2022). By embedding intelligence directly into service processes, hospitality organizations can now dynamically anticipate guest needs, reduce friction, and cultivate perceived value in ways that materially influence satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention (Alshurideh et al., 2012; Alkitbi et al., 2020).

However, this transformation also produces new structural risks, including algorithmic bias, data commodification, labor displacement, and the erosion of authentic human interaction, all of which complicate the ethical and strategic foundations of customer retention (Bryson, 2017; Brockhaus et al., 2020). As Goel (2025) argues, the shift from concierge-led to cloud-mediated hospitality represents a paradigmatic reorganization of service authority, wherein decision-making increasingly migrates from frontline employees to algorithmic systems that mediate customer experience. This raises critical questions about whether digital efficiency can substitute for emotional labor, whether platform-driven personalization enhances or undermines trust, and how organizations can balance technological optimization with relational authenticity.

Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative meta-analytic and interpretive research design grounded in the Technology–Organization–Environment framework and contemporary customer retention theory, enabling a systematic synthesis of how SaaS technologies interact with organizational culture, employee engagement, and customer perception to shape retention outcomes (Al Hadwer et al., 2021; Alshurideh, 2016). Rather than relying on numerical modeling, the analysis develops a layered conceptual narrative that connects cloud architectures, AI-driven service encounters, and internal marketing practices into a unified theoretical explanation of hospitality value creation.

The findings demonstrate that SaaS adoption in hospitality does not merely automate existing processes but fundamentally restructures how hospitality firms conceptualize guests, employees, and service itself. Retention emerges not as a function of satisfaction alone but as an outcome of continuous digital dialogue between customer data, service algorithms, and organizational identity (Almohaimmeed, 2019; Ang & Buttle, 2006). The study concludes that sustainable customer retention in the digital hospitality era depends on the ability of firms to integrate SaaS technologies into ethically grounded, culturally embedded, and human-centered service strategies, rather than treating technology as a substitute for relational engagement (Buhalis, 2020; Goel, 2025).