Very easily recreated by starting a new game and making yourself enemies with the empire, then generating a Hospitality Quest (all of them are broken). Sometimes it spawns in the pawns but they aren't under your control and usually just leave the map quickly.
And without using the dev mode, I am almost sure we can still accept hospitality quests we get before turning the Empire faction hostile.
I noticed this too, as soon as you are enemies of the empire none of the hospitality quests work (whether or not the quest was given by the empire or not), the enemies that spawn as a result of the quest still appear, as does the shuttle. But the prisoner/guest/animal that you are supposed to take care of never arrives .
It seems to have broken with the update last night
Yes, we had this major bug, it should be fixed now.