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Guests having breakfast may be surprised when a robot asks them how they’d like their eggs
round 25 years ago, Abid Butt was staying in a hotel in Thailand and called downstairs for an adaptor. “Ten or 15 minutes later, all of a sudden there were security officers standing outside my door with a first-aid box because they thought I had asked for a doctor and were worried something was wrong,” says Dream Hotel Group’s CEO of Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa.
Butt believes these classic cases of misunderstanding could soon be relegated to history. His company’s Dream Downtown hotel in Manhattan, New York City, has introduced Google Assistant Interpreter Mode to its reception area. Guests can speak in their native language to the device and have their requests translated to hotel staff. “People are very happy that they’re not struggling trying to express what they need, so it immediately relaxes them,” he says, adding that the most commonly translated languages are Mandarin, Spanish and French. He adds: “In the early 90s when Japanese travellers were contributing hordes of numbers around the globe, we would look for the language profi ciency in the staff to be able to do that. Now, technology is facilitating that 24 hours a day, and at a much better cost efficiency.” Across the Pacific at the Orchard Hotel Singapore, guests looking to get their morning protein fix may be surprised to find a robot asking them how they’d like their eggs. The “Autonomous Service Chef Associate” can cook eggs either as omelettes or sunny side up during breakfast at the hotel’s Orchard Café. There is also a front-of-house “Autonomous Service Delivery Robot”, which can deliver room amenities such as towels and bottled water.
“It initially took a while for our guests to warm to the idea of being served by robots. But the novelty of opening your door to be greeted by a robot, or watching a robot arm prepare your eggs – they offer our guests a nice surprise and, frankly, a great photo opportunity,” says Byron Chong, the hotel’s general manager. Japan’s Henn-na hotel, just over an hour’s drive from Nagasaki, has a whole staff of robots, including a velociraptor concierge. But the robots seem to have created more problems for guests than pleasure, according to a Wall Street Journal report, which adds that the hotel has culled over half of its 243 robots, many because they created work rather than reduced it. These examples offer a glimpse of what the hotel of the future might look like. While robots may be a little too sci-fi for some, there are other more technological advancements that travellers will come to view as being as indispensable as having universal high-speed wifi throughout a hotel.
Keyless check-in is one such technology. Business
Traveller reported in November 2014 that Starwood Hotels & Resorts had launched a keyless entry system so its loyalty members could use a smartphone as their hotel key. Other large hotel groups soon followed suit, including Hilton, Hyatt and Intercontinental.
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