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Tech

Why Robots Aren't the Bellhops of the Future

Or they aren't entirely, at least.
Image: XiXinXing/Shutterstock

You can safely file "robot bellhop" under least-surprising things. Some physical object, whether it's a piece of luggage or a copy of the bill, is  here and it needs to be moved there. To accomplish this task, a robot needs to be able to navigate a hallway, open a door, and, finally, produce the item in question.

That's nothing at all and a Silicon Valley Aloft Hotels property has just introduced such a machine, called Botlr. Here's what it does:

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I can assume that in the absence of arms or a luggage rack, Botlr is pretty limited in its bellperson duties. That doesn't mean the manipulation of luggage onto and off of a cart is beyond robot capabilities and, sure, Botlr is probably just the beginning.

Robots (or touch-screen computers) have already replaced front desk clerks at many hotels, and really a whole lot of the humans you see at a given hotel are working in low-wage, high-turnover positions that a corporate overseer might view as robot-ready.

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The catch is that, unlike a lot of the automated futures we see materializing around us, such a future isn't preordained in the hotel industry. There is an entirely different move underfoot within hospitality to push people and personalities (as corny or  even shill-y as that may sound), which isn't the result of corporate Luddites so much as it is the recognition of something that's missed entirely by the notion of a robot bellperson, in particular: people that pay for $1,000 hotel rooms entirely cease to be paying for physical stuff somewhere around the $200 mark and begin paying for the performance of a nice hotel.

If you happen to have a rich person handy, ask them: luxury is an interaction with the world, not a thing. I certainly don't say this as a rich person—rather, I was a bellperson for about eight years. I worked at a few places, including two either owned or licensed by the parent company of Aloft, Starwood Hotels. They were OK places, both exquisitely talented at cutting corners, but mostly successful at feeling entirely anonymous. Already in the '90s, they felt robot-ready and I usually got the sense that a lot of guests would rather deal with a robot anyway. With Botlr, they can breathe a sigh of relief (and keep their singles).

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The other half of my bellperson career was spent at a chain/"group" of hotels that's gotten pretty big and popular by now, but was just a handful of not-really-branded places around the West Coast in the early-'00s. I shouldn't mention the name, but hotel-spotters can figure it out easily enough.

This is where I met the other group of rich hotel people. What was maybe a bit startling in this new kind of service role was just how interested this variety of rich person was in me, in particular. They so often had questions about the hotel or the restaurant up the street but what they really wanted was to talk. They wanted the usual bellperson formalities but also this whole other layer on top of it. Not so much "what restaurants are good around here" but "where would you, the bellperson, go on a date." That kind of thing.

Or, I also had a good list of regulars that already knew my whole story and would ask me about my budding journalism career or my bike rides. This is the interaction, the not-robot thing, that's harder to explain but it's one of the big reasons why people stay at a certain class of hotel.

Weird, eh? People spending all of this money so they can do something like let their guard down. Like, here's this environment where other people are going to be nice in this certain time-tested way and maybe even genuine too. If you, as a bellperson, managed to combine those two things, you would experience life as a cash-magnet.

That hotel, the last one, did wind up getting a rather unique lobby denizen: a fat, happy yellow dog. He lived with our manager and his kids, but came to work everyday that manager was on-duty and just sat around the lobby grinning like a fool. Sometimes he would follow me when I took guests up with luggage, but usually hung around soliciting attention. I mention this because I can't very well think of more diametrically opposed things in this world than a fat, happy dog, and Botlr, a hip robot. Pick for yourself.