While there is abundant knowledge about the antecedents and outcomes of hotel mobile app adoption, research has rarely looked into users' actual use experience with these apps. Guided by service-dominant logic, technology affordance theory, and cognitive mapping, this study investigates and compares hoteliers' and customers' perceptions of branded hotel mobile apps. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with managers and customers based on the same pool of focal hotel mobile apps. The findings unearth noticeable differences between the two groups' understanding of using hotel mobile apps for stay personalization. This is mainly attributed to customers’ uncertainties during use, the relative importance of their needs, and their different interpretations of personalized experience. The findings demonstrate the mechanism underlying the interpretation of technological functions which human beings act upon to create value. They provide practical implications for hoteliers to understand why and how users may or may not perceive the app value as expected.