One may find the reception at the Henn na Hotel located in the east of Tokyo to be very quiet, but when a customer nears to the robot dinosaurs as a receptionist in the front desk, their sensors detect the moving person and they start with a loud noise “Welcome”.
The reception may be the most weird check-in experience possible, but that’s what actually is the point at Henn na chain (Henn na means ‘weird’), as the hotel calls itself the first one in the whole world to have robot staff.
The front desk staff robots are a pair of giant dinosaurs that look very much similar to the characters in Jurassic Park movies.
The robo-dinos request you to check-in through a tablet system that also allows customers to choose the language they are comfortable with – Japanese, Chinese, English Or Korean – to be able to communicate with the multilingual robots.
The effect of such behavior on us is unusual, as the large-sized dinosaurs’ gesture with their long arms while speaking. The manager at the Henn na Hotel Maihama Tokyo Bay, Yukio Nagai, says that some customers really do find the hotel atmosphere slightly unnerving.
“We haven’t quite figured out when exactly the guests want to be served by people, and when it’s okay to be served by robots,” he told AFP.
But other guests like the style as a novelty. Every room has its own mini-robots that are somewhat similar to spherical Star Wars droid BB-8, help guests with each and everything like changing channels for playing music.
Even the fish displayed in the lobby swim with the power on batteries, and as they swim, electric lights flicker on and off in their articulated bodies.
“The dinosaurs looked intriguing, and I thought my son would love it,” said Chigusa Hosoi, who visited the hotel with her three-year-old.
“My son is really happy. There’s an egg-shaped robot inside the room. He was playing with it a lot.”
The first of its kind Hotel, Henn na Hotel was inaugurated in Nagasaki in the year 2015 and was certified the next year by Guinness World Records for being the first hotel with robotic staff.
The chain of hotels of Henn na Hotel is run by a travel agency which has got eight hotels across the country who have robots on the staff and some of them are dinosaurs, but others have human-like shape.
Nagai said that using robots for everything from front desk duty to cleaning the hotel had proved to be a good choice, especially in a country, where there is a shrinking labor market.
“It’s becoming difficult to secure enough labour at hotels. To solve that problem, we have robots serving guests,” she said.
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