2
Robots lose out in hospitality
Wet, tired David checked in with robot receptionist at the Hyatt Place in Roanoke, Va.
To view this content, Javascript must be enabled and Adobe Flash Player must be installed.
Jeremy Hobson: Here in this country, many jobs are being replaced by machines -- which brings us to David Brancaccio of Marketplace's Economy 4.0 team, who is currently driving 3,200 miles across this country without interacting with humans.
Here's his report on some technology that made that trip possible.
David Brancaccio: It doesn't have arms or eyes or a voice like this.
"Lost in Space" Robot from Museum of Science: I've been trying to overload my power cells and burn out my primary memory banks.
But this kiosk at Hyatt Place hotels lets you check in with swipes of the credit card. The thing prints your room number and receipt on a thin strip of paper, and out of a slot comes a plastic card so you can let yourself into the room. When Hyatt strung enough of these hotels across the country so I could reach each one in a long day's drive, it made possible this strange idea of a journey across America dealing only with technology. At each of the hotels, I've also found a human receptionist full of customer service enthusiasm, but I've been trying to avoid them without being a jerk.
But it's not all smooth sailing. Each time I've tried, it's taken at least four swipes to get it to take and I had to switch to my back-up credit card twice.
Brancaccio in hotel: After 10 swipes, it works.
In fact, when I called ahead before the trip, the hotel in Albuquerque told me I'd better get there quick, because they're getting rid of their kiosk in a few weeks. The one in Las Vegas had already removed the kiosks, something about repair costs was the hint.
So I had to scout for a competing Westin Element hotel that had one of the bots up and working. Some labor market experts note that robots don't require health care coverage, and in this way technology has an advantage over the human workforce. But at least we don't need a repairman.
Brancaccio: Deposit applied, outstanding balance zero. That's what we like. Confirm!
To confirm what I was hearing, we reached out to Hyatt. It's official: the company is eliminating the robots. Word is, only 2 percent of travelers are using them and the company says the guests really like the "Gallery Hosts" instead. So here's the news: in the battle versus the robots, the humans have just won a major skirmish in the hospitality industry.
On the road, I'm David Brancaccio for Marketplace.
@mgraban: Ah - but someday, robots will be able to help people; certainly today, the kiosks are not up to the task (one of the big problems is those fussy mag-stripe readers - when are smart-cards going to take over? They're all over Europe and Asia, but not in dumb, backwards America, of course).
I'm sure people lamented the same things about bank ATMs and human tellers; when was the last time you used a human teller? For me, it was months ago (and only because of some possible fraud activity caught by the bank's intelligent computer algorithms; thank $DEITY for artificial neural networks!)...
I long for the day when I don't have to interact with strangers with faux cheerfulness; I try to use self-checkout whenever I can. The majority of the time, it works perfectly. The rest of the time it fails, usually because of the aforementioned mag-stripe issues, or because of "anti-theft" controls (item is expensive, so is flagged, but is so small that it weighs nothing, so the scale doesn't "feel" that you put in the bag), or because of "age-check" controls (why it just can't ask for me to scan my driver's license or something, and compare that with my credit card - I don't know).
So-called "hospitality robots" won't make great in-roads here in America, not until they are everywhere else in the world already (and maybe not even then - look how long it took for smart phones here in the USA to catch up with what Asia had for over a decade).
In an interesting parallel, some hospitals have (foolishly, I think) tried similar kiosks to let patients check in when arriving to the emergency room. I wonder if Parkland in hospital (where JFK died after being assassinated) is still using their kiosks. I was skeptical about this when they installed them a few years back: http://www.leanblog.org/2007/07/press-1-if-youre-hurting-in-english/
Now, there's a place where you really need a human seeing you... because you might not think you have a life threatening problem and a human can detect that where a kiosk cannot. Plus, you really don't want to be touching a kiosk that's been used by a bunch of sick people.
A good technology lesson - just because you CAN do something with technology doesn't mean that you should. Supermarkets are also pulling out many of their self scanners.
I hope hospitals pull back from this idea of robots delivering linens and meals through hospital hallways, as I blogged about here: http://www.leanblog.org/2012/03/the-more-sophisticated-brains-robots-or-...
Robots can't see when people are lost and need help. They certainly can't make suggestions that make the hospital better. People can!
