Rising costs and shortages of available labor are major problems facing the hotel industry. Whether it is the potential use of autonomy to eliminate some tasks like food delivery and cleaning public spaces or co-bots to assist associates in becoming more efficient and productive, robots are a potential part of the solution to staffing challenges.
How do you see robots potentially impacting hotels and where can they make the most difference?
Robotic cleaning of lobby and corridor areas make sense, plus robotic grass cutting. Less relevant for room cleaning given the corners and obstacles, although Neom is exploring this. Car parking via flat bots that rise up and lift the car off its wheels also work well and can optimise space in limited car parks. Amazon are leading with similar bots in their massive warehouses to move pallets around.
Room service delivery via robots appears in some current hotels but it's more a PR stunt. Ok for cold beverages, but food would be cold before it's delivered given the necessarily torturously slow and cautious rate of the devices. In Yotel NYC we still have "Yobot" (a repurposed bot from a car assembly line) which puts luggage away and retrieves it, and it's very popular, although more as an Instagram backdrop. Best to keep bots away from guest-facing activities like checkin, unless your hotel is a deliberate tech showcase like some of the Japanese pod hotels. Also, a good chef would throw a bot of of his/her kitchen window and rightly so. Food prep is a science and an art. Bot food prep might work in a dark kitchen for pizzas.
This year labor costs in hospitality consume 1/3 of hotel revenue (STR) and robotization and automation are becoming increasingly appealing to hotel owners and operators.
Ex. Robots like Rosie by Tailos, thousands of which have already been deployed at various hotels, clean guest rooms 20 percent faster and public areas up to 80 percent faster than human housekeepers. Robot waiters by Keenon Robotics and Bear Robotics are already deployed in over 25,000 restaurants worldwide and replace 100% of the waitstaff.
There are three main impediments to fast robotization of hospitality: a) reluctance to invest in new technologies by real-estate minded owners and operators, b) lack of understanding and fear of new technology:
Who will deal with it? I don't have trained staff to deal with it. It makes operations very complex, and c) The labor unions in cities with highly-unionized hospitality labor force are against any robotization or any technology advancement that can reduce the number of paying members.In my view, none of the above can stop the rapid advancements in the adoption of robotics and automation in our industry, in the same manner as the Luddite movement in early 19th century England could not stop the Industrial Revolution.
Of course! We've seen robots in progressive hotels and resorts for years. You're right that cleaning and innovative food delivery are the easier pickings. But we should discuss that bright red line that starts and ends with the front desk. It isn't robotics but smart locks and key dispersal services that has enabled us to provide ways to avoid the front desk - and those technologies will only improve and draw more guests to use them over time. With aps and integration into the PMS, it is becoming trivial to offer direct and pre-check-in services. But that too will come to many more properties soon. The bright red line goes in several directions. Four and five star properties will be expected to provide quality front desk services into the long-term future. Front desk robots were a short-term novelty. The real gains will be in improved guest service using AI to predict wants and needs by accumulating personal information from sources inside and outside of the hotel and chain boundaries. These are exciting times for those of us in technology!
When we consider the idea of robotics as a consistent producer of process in hospitality, it's not new. Particuarly when we remember that robots as a term, does not only apply to the idea of our humanoid like friends as an accomplice to tasks that we might need to fulfil.
My view has been that as much as there is opportunity for our humanoid friends, it's more likely that the rise of adoption will occur through software driven robots or the term often used, Robotic Process Automation.
RPA has significant opportunity for adoption and in many cases is well on the way. It's far less intrusive from the perspective of visiblity. Far less hard tech involved as it is essentially a software program. Therefore, far more accepted, affordable and deployed as it does not seem so confronting to the traditional human workforce.
Today, software is a generally accepted bona fide productivity tool in our industry. Thus making software driven RPA an easier path to adoption. R2D2 and co will take a little longer as a direct physical displacement of the human workforce.
We are on the way, but 2025 won't be the tipping year!
