How Maltese boutique hotels exploit AI agents to enhance customer experience

Abstract

This dissertation examines how decision-makers in Maltese boutique hotels perceive, evaluate, and potentially adopt AI chatbots and AI agents to enhance customer experience across the guest journey. The study addresses a context in which hospitality is becoming increasingly digital, while boutique hotels continue to compete through intimacy, personalisation, trust, and visible human service rather than scale and standardisation. An interpretivist qualitative approach was adopted. The research was exploratory in design and based on eight semi-structured in-depth interviews with boutique hotel decision-makers in Malta. All interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. The study focused on managerial perceptions of AI capability, service suitability across the pre-stay, in-stay, and post-stay journey, operational feasibility, trust, integration, and governance. The findings indicate that Maltese boutique hotels do not reject AI-enabled guest service in principle. Most participants regarded AI as potentially useful when deployed selectively for repetitive, low-emotion, and administratively burdensome communication tasks, particularly routine pre-stay and in-stay enquiries such as FAQs, logistical questions, and multilingual support. However, participants also drew clear boundaries around automating arrival, complaint handling, service recovery, and other emotionally sensitive guest interactions. The findings further show that adoption depends not only on favourable attitudes, but also on PMS and API integration, organisational readiness, governance confidence, data and privacy concerns, and clear human handover protocols. The dissertation concludes that the most credible path for Maltese boutique hotels is carefully governed augmentation rather than replacement. The main implication is that boutique hotels should adopt AI cautiously and selectively, using it to support bounded service tasks while preserving human-led interaction at the trust-intensive moments most central to the boutique experience.