Japan to open robot hotel
A new hotel, the Henn na is replacing its general hotel staff in different parts of the building with robots to try and save on labour costs. The hotel replaces keys with facial recognition, automatic trolleys bring your luggage to your room and robots takes your coat, secure it in a locker and then brings it back to you when you want it again. The hotel has future plans for drones to deliver snacks to rooms and robotic cleaning and aiding guests.
A new hotel in Japan is opening that sees robots and humanoids replacing general hotel staff in different parts of the building. It’s called Henn na Hotel (Evolve Hotel) and will look at new technology for consistent improvements.

Flush with cute replacement of standard items to suit the capability of robot staff – facial recognition is used instead of keys because robots aren’t great at searching down the side of a couch, an automatic trolley brings your luggage to your room – the hotel aspires to achieve efficiency.

For example, the cloakroom looks like a car manufacturing facility, with a robot arm bringing you your locker and then placing it in a safe compartment until you need it again. Nothing strange here, folks, just a normal hotel…

But it’s not just efficiency that Henn na Hotel is aware of, it also knows a good marketing tool. Especially so when you consider the hotel is slap bang in the middle of an amusement park.

“I wanted to highlight innovation,” said Hideo Sawada, the man running Henn na. “I also wanted to do something about hotel prices going up.”

In future, there will be drones delivering snacks to rooms, with robots whizzing around the hotel cleaning up and helping guests.

Oh and the front desk robots are dinosaurs. I can see absolutely no way that this could end badly. Ruptly’s video of the hotel provides a better picture:

Main image via Shutterstock, hotel image via Henn Na Hotel