As an important part of the service industry, the hospitality industry fuels economic growth in many countries by providing a large number of employment positions. As the hospitality industry faces greater competitive pressure from globalisation and customisation, it needs to meet customer demand and gain customer loyalty by giving customers unique and memorable experiences (Chathoth et al., 2013). Hospitality management with positive customer satisfaction ratings achieve a sustainable competitive advantage through increased customer loyalty (Hanzaee & Mirvaisi, 2011; Zablah et al., 2012). The pursuit of the ‘customer is God’ philosophy remains a key priority for the hospitality industry (Rafaeli et al., 2012). The philosophy, called customer orientation (CO), refers to enduring employee attitudes and behaviours that are indicative of ardent concern towards the needs, wants and demands of an organisation’s customers (Babakus et al., 2010; Zablah et al., 2012). CO is an important personality trait that enables employees to carry out their tasks in the workplace. Specifically, customer-oriented employees are able to deal with customer requests and problems promptly, treat customers with politeness and kindness and maintain a consistent level of emotionality during their interactions with customers (Babakus et al., 2009). Customer-oriented employees are likely to be satisfied with their jobs and have lower turnover intentions, because they have higher levels of self-control (Babakus et al., 2009). Moreover, there is a natural fit between employees high in CO and the requirements of frontline service jobs (Karatepe & Douri, 2012). Because CO is increasingly important to success, it has gained a significant amount of attention from academia (Lee & Hwang, 2016). CO is positively correlated with organizational success, customer loyalty and job satisfaction and negatively correlated with burnout and turnover intentions (Akbar et al., 2010; Hanzaee & Mirvaisi, 2011; Kim & Jogaratnam, 2010; Lee & Hwang, 2016; Zablah et al., 2012). A review of the relevant literature reveals two research gaps. First of all, despite the amount of research showing a negative relationship between CO and job burnout, remarkably little is known about how these relationships are established. Considering the importance of CO, the directives for frontline hospitality employees who deliver CO programmes and high job burnout, a greater understanding of hospitality management for reducing employee job burnout could be achieved by an examination of the interplay of these factors. Thus, this study intends to explore the lived experiences of frontline employees in the hospitality industry to explain the effect of CO directives on employee job burnout. A second, more important, gap lies in overlooking the emotional nature of hospitality service work. CO and job burnout and their connection with emotional labour have not been researched sufficiently. As a result, frontline employees’ reactive behaviours to the emotional demands of their jobs are related with CO and job burnout in the hospitality industry, but its context is still somewhat limited. Thus, this study intends to find a mediator that explains how the relationship between CO and job burnout is established from the perspective of emotional labour.