Calibrated Digital Hybridity in Hotel Operations: A Secondary Qualitative Analysis of Technology, Human Judgment, and Operational Resilience

Hotel digitalization is often evaluated through adoption, acceptance, or investment, yet the operational value of technology depends on whether systems, employees, infrastructure, authority, and fallback routines continue to work together under routine and disrupted conditions. This secondary qualitative study reanalyzes 11 interviews with hotel owners, managers, and frontline employees from seven hotels in Tagaytay City, Philippines. The interviews were originally collected for a broader mixed-method study but are reexamined here using different research questions and a socio-technical resilience lens. Reflexive thematic analysis generated four interrelated themes: technology becomes operational infrastructure; efficiency introduces new points of fragility; digital capability is produced through uneven learning ecologies; and resilience depends on calibrated digital hybridity. Participants described digital systems as central to reservations, room status, billing, reporting, inventory, personalization, and service coordination, while also identifying internet outages, aging hardware, system errors, restrictive permissions, human encoding mistakes, training differences, and cost constraints as sources of operational vulnerability. Calibrated digital hybridity is proposed as an interpretive concept describing the deliberate matching of automation depth to transaction scale and complexity, workforce capability, technical reliability, investment timing, and the continued availability of human discretion and manual fallback. The findings extend hotel technology research beyond willingness to adopt technology by showing how digital systems become embedded in everyday work and how hotels preserve service continuity when those systems fail or employees encounter exceptions. Managerially, the results support staged automation, exception-focused training, clear decision rights, infrastructure audits, and documented fallback procedures. The study positions digital hospitality as a socio-technical resilience problem rather than a technology-acquisition problem alone.

Keywords:
digital hospitality, operational resilience, socio-technical systems, hotel employees, digital transformation

Hospitality and Tourism Management; Technology and Digital Transformation in Management; Operations Management; Crisis Management and Resilience

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