Hoteliers try their best to leave guests with positive memories by offering excellent hospitality services. It’s their goal to have you go and share your experience with others so they can attract more guests. Now, they are going a step further by introducing robots into the hospitality industry.
Take for instance Marriott and Hilton; robot butlers are at your service. They will bring you towels, groceries, toothpaste, etc. to your room and even engage with you. This may seem new to you, but if you have visited Aloft Hotels, you might have interacted with them since their locations started employing robots for their services back in 2014. They intended to surprise guests with room delivery. A few years later, more hotels started copying this idea and a study by Houston University estimated that robots will make up to 25% of the hospitality workforce by 2030. However, not everyone is a fan of the hotel robots as some prefer human interaction.
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Robots have their advantages, but there are some services you cannot expect them to provide, like opening that champagne bottle or pouring your wine. It has always been the goal of hotels to attract more guests and give them exceptional services that will make them want to come back later. They are positive that employing robots is one way to accomplish this. However, for a hotel in Japan, Henn na, that was not the case as they were forced to reduce their robot workforce by half since guests complained about malfunctions. For example, robots mistook snoring for speech and woke up sleeping guests on several occasions.
Hotel worker unions are also not pleased with this new technology. They have held several strikes over the same issue and all the hotels did was promise unions that they will give prior notice to workers before introducing these machines. They also promised to train employees on their use.
With improvements in technology and the effects of the pandemic as we try to reduce human contact, we are likely to see more robot butlers take over the hotel industry in the future.
What are your thoughts on hotel robot butlers? Let us know down in the comments.
This article originally published on GREY Journal.
