<p>The occupational stigma prevalent among hotel employees poses a serious threat to employees’ job performance. However, few studies address how to lessen the internalized occupational stigma of employees, known as occupational self-stigma. Addressing this research gap, this paper adopts the emotion as social information model to investigate the impact of customer gratitude on employees’ occupational self-stigma through the mediating roles of cognitive job crafting and positive emotions. 303 valid questionnaires collected from hotel employees in three waves were employed to examine the hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that customer gratitude can diminish employees’ occupational self-stigma through cognitive job crafting and employees’ positive emotions, with employees’ other-orientation enhancing the positive effect of customer gratitude on employees’ positive emotions. This study not only enriches the literature on occupational destigmatization in the hospitality industry but also deepens our understanding of the consequences of customer gratitude by examining its impact on occupational self-stigma. Finally, this research adopts the emotion as social information model to understand the inhibitory mechanism of occupational self-stigma, providing a new theoretical perspective for understanding the mechanism of occupational destigmatization.</p>