Servicescape As Biopolitical Space: Surveillance, Biometric Data Capture, And Guest Agency In Smart Hotels
Keywords:
smart hotel, servicescape, Michel Foucault, surveillance, digital hospitalityAbstract
This article examines the smart hotel servicescape through Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power, surveillance, panopticism, biopolitics, and governmentality. Contemporary smart hotels increasingly incorporate facial recognition, biometric authentication, mobile check-in, digital keys, CCTV systems, artificial intelligence-based personalization, Internet of Things devices, and data-driven monitoring of guest behavior. Although these technologies are commonly presented as tools for convenience, security, operational efficiency, and service personalization, they also transform the guest’s body, movements, preferences, and behavioral patterns into measurable and governable data. The study adopts a qualitative research framework combining semi-structured interviews with critical discourse analysis. The proposed empirical design focuses on guests who have experienced smart hotel technologies and on discourses embedded in privacy policies, biometric consent interfaces, check-in procedures, and hotel marketing materials. Foucault’s theoretical concepts are employed as analytical categories to examine how surveillance is normalized, how biometric data become resources of organizational power, and how guests negotiate or resist technological control. The analysis suggests that the smart hotel should not be understood merely as an advanced technological servicescape, but as a biopolitical environment in which hospitality, convenience, surveillance, classification, and behavioral management intersect. At the same time, guests are not entirely passive subjects. Guest agency may be expressed through refusal of biometric identification, preference for human-assisted check-in, selective use of hotel applications, limitation of digital permissions, and questioning of data collection practices. The article contributes to critical hospitality studies by extending conventional technology-adoption approaches and conceptualizing the smart hotel as a site of negotiated digital power.
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