World's first robot hotel makes android staff redundant

  • 26 Jan - 01 Feb, 2019
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Mag Files

The world's first robot hotel has ditched half its 243 android staff – as they do not work as well as humans.

The Henn-na Hotel in Japan – translated as Strange Hotel – found that robots annoyed the guests and would often break down.

Guests complained their robot room assistants thought snoring were commands and would wake then up repeatedly during the night. Meanwhile, the robot at the front desk could not answer basic questions.

And human staff ended up working overtime to repair robots that stopped working. One staff member said: "It's easier now that we're not being frequently called by guests to help with problems with the robots.”

Strange Hotel, in Sasebo, opened in 2015 amid a blaze of publicity and was recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the first all robot hotel in the world. It originally had 80 robots and the number soon tripled. But according to the Wall Street Journal, problems began soon after.

Hideo Sawada, president of the travel company which owns the Strange Hotel, told the Wall Street Journal he had not given up on the idea of a robot hotel, but admitted it needed some tweaking.

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