This study addressed the mediating mechanism of emotional labor in the relationship between customer-related stress and burnout in hotel industry, which has not been clearly explored in prior work. Empirical data was collected from 219 hotel frontline employees in China. The results suggest that customer-related stress are related to different emotional regulation strategies (i.e., surface acting, deep acting and genuine emotion expression), which in turn impacts employees’ burnout symptoms in various ways. This study sheds new light on the controversial issue of the stress-burnout relationship.