The world's first all-robot run hotel was opened in Japan in 2015. The machine menagerie only lasted a short time before the management decided to change their strategy.
The luggage carriers couldn't go outside. A question-and-answer robot could not comprehend what a guest was saying, so it woke him multiple times to tell him it couldn't. The hotel had to increase staff in order to help and repair the struggling robot.
Many hotels looked to automate parts of their services around this time, like checking in and out, storing luggage, delivering room service, making breakfast, vacuuming carpets, and providing digital door keys. Yotel in New York City even automated its hotel room furniture after partnering with IBM to create a robot concierge.
Hotels want to use robots to save costs. Some of the interest for robots in this space was revived by the COVID-19 Pandemic, which may have been one of the reasons for the revival. New health guidelines had to be adopted by hotels because of labor shortages. According to USA Today, there was an increase in the use of robots for cleaning.
The hope is that engineers will learn from the chaos of the Japanese hotel. Management needs to separate the services performed by robots and the services performed by humans. It seems like the same issues around the integration of hotelrobots keep coming up.
The complete article can be found at PopSci.
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