At the Henn-na Hotel, aka “Weird Hotel,” the entire premises is staffed by robots ranging from human-like receptionist, helpful desk lamps, bag carriers, and dinosaurs.
Hideo Sawada, CEO of the Henn-na hotel, predicts that in 5-10 years, robot hotels like his own will spread all over the world. While this brings about issues of unemployment for humans and what work they “have left” to do, Sawada claims that humans will need to do what only they can do–be human.
But at this hotel customers find the lack of human interaction to be quite lonely in their already isolated stay. Another has mentioned that the “weird hotel” gets kinda boring after the first stay, and that it wasn’t someplace that they can see themselves staying beyond one or two times. I’m wondering if this kind of service is beneficial or even profitable if it’s a one-time deal, or if it’s still at the stage of “strange” and “different” where it attracts enough people to compensate for everyone visiting for a small amount of time. While for me personally at-the-desk social interaction is not what I look most forward to at a hotel, I would probably find the robot staff, at first, interesting, and then unsettling. How beneficial is an all robot staff when the main complaint coincides with what the Henn-na advertises–no human interaction?
With my experience in customer service-type jobs, one of the main priorities is to interact with politeness, warmth, and efficiency. While robots can be programmed to respond in the most perfect, correct manner that the company/employer intends to happen during every interaction with a customer, I find that it would be the lack of readable sincerity or connection that would pull me out of the experience.
