I’m sorry to be such a wet blanket, but the first robot hotel opened up just outside of Sasebo, Japan near the fantastic Dutch amusement park, Huis Ten Bosch. Same company, just more than eight years earlier.
I guess more English speaking tourists would encounter a hotel in Ginza than Nagasaki prefecture, but I don’t think the Ginza branch had the option of being checked in by a dinosaur. And yes, a lot of humans still work at the hotel, but they do their best to keep the illusion going.
Yeah, I was thinking they could reduce their staff by a few people overall, but there’s still so much that requires people - cleaning, for one (the amount of labor saved by the use of glorified Roombas isn’t going to make a difference), not to mention the staff required to actually deal with customer issues (no AI is going to be good enough to deal with that), that it’s not much of a saving, and when you consider they now also need a dedicated tech support staff, I wonder if overall they need more people…
Unrelated but I actually know a couple of former Disney Imagineers who used that line when they got laid off after a project. If anyone could make good on that promise it would be them.
