The Hotel That Fired Its Robots, and the Smarter Machines Checking In After It

In 2015, Japan's Henn na Hotel opened as the world's first robot-staffed hotel, complete with a velociraptor at check-in. By 2019 it had made headlines again, this time for retiring about half of its robots after guests complained: the in-room assistant woke sleepers when it mistook snoring for a command, and the machines created more work for the human staff than they saved. It remains the most instructive failure in service robotics, and it did not kill the hotel robot. It taught it manners.

The second wave is boring, and that is the point

In 2026, robots roam more hotel corridors than ever, but they have stopped pretending to be staff. They are logistics. Delivery robots from firms like Relay, Keenon and Pudu carry towels, toothbrushes and midnight snacks to guest rooms, riding lifts on their own and phoning the room on arrival; Marriott's Aloft brand pioneered the concept with its Botlr butler robot. Properties using them report around a 25 percent drop in front-desk calls for amenities, and the machines absorb the 2 a.m. requests no manager wants to staff for. YOTEL's luggage-storing Yobot and fleets of autonomous vacuum scrubbers complete the picture: robots doing the invisible work, humans doing the welcome.

The economics explain the momentum. Industry surveys report that 87 percent of American hotels faced staffing shortages in 2025, with housekeeping the hardest role to fill, annual turnover running between 70 and 80 percent, and labour costs around a third of revenue. Analysts value the hospitality robot market at roughly 0.8 to 1 billion dollars in 2026 and expect it to more than double by 2031, growing around 24 percent a year. Against 1.5 million unfilled hospitality jobs reported in the United States alone, the robot is less a novelty than a shift filler.

Hospitality's oldest rule still applies

What separates the second wave from Henn na's first is a simple discipline: automate the task, not the relationship. Guests never wanted a dinosaur to check them in; they wanted their extra pillow in four minutes. The hotels succeeding with robots deploy them where reliability beats charm, and keep humans where a smile is the product. Even Henn na now runs a hybrid model, a lean human team supervising the machines, which the industry quietly treats as the gold standard.

Our take: hospitality is where robotics learns humility. A warehouse tolerates a clumsy robot; a tired guest does not. The sector's lesson applies to every industry now hiring humanoids: the question is never whether the robot impresses on day one, but whether anyone would miss it on day 400. The towel-carrying bots of 2026 pass that test. The velociraptor never did.