As the effects of Covid wanes and travel slowly resumes, the hotel industry is slowly normalising to it's pre-covid occupancy levels. The hotel industry, as a whole, contributes much to Singapore's business hub status and drives growth in adjacent businesses such as retail, food and beverage (F&B), and meetings, incentives, conventions, and exhibitions (MICE).
Great Manpower Crunch
While consistent expansion in hotel rooms demand are expected, it is possible that labor will not be able to keep up at the same rate, as rehiring stalls.
As a result, hotels are increasingly in need of solutions to enhance labor productivity, allowing them to operate with a smaller workforce in the future while improving the service experience and adding value for hotel guests.
Robots and automation are likely to feature strongly in the coming years as manpower costs goes up and hiring restrictions tighten. In this article, we highlight some of the benefits robots can bring and also how to to assess if your hotel is robot-ready.
Hotel current workflows
At Autove, our focus is primarily on our users - the hotel operations team. How might robots be able to help current hotel teams to achieve productivity? For instance, sending a towel or a toothbrush set to a certain guest room. Normally that will require having housekeeping to collect from a store before delivering it straight to the guest. The entire process goes through 1-2 personnel before the item reaches the guest.
With delivery robots in place, all the housekeeping personnel have to do after receiving the order from the app, is to place the item into the robot and key in the room number. Then the delivery robot will do the rest. The robot will travel directly to the room, riding elevators to the right floor level and notifying the guest mobile or hotel phone system upon reaching its destination.
This reduces the need for one personnel to run the items to the guest room, freeing up their time to either manage more deliveries or to attend to more urgent guest needs. And by scaling up to more robots, this will drastically reduce the need to hire more personnel, avoiding the manpower crunch, especially during peak period. We believe that this is just one of many issues that hotel operations team are currently facing, and we hope to be able to help more teams along the way.
Is your hotel robot-ready?
With this basic delivery robot checklist, you can also quickly assess whether your hotel environment is conducive for robot operations:
Do you have a clear delivery route you like to trial?
What are the size of items that would normally be delivered?
Do the route have doors? We tend to avoid doors (unless automated).
Are there any obstacles along the route that are glass (in material) or black (dark colours)?
What brand of lifts do you use and is it more than 10 years old?
At Autove, these are just some of the factors we will take into consideration upon conducting site surveys. We also consider operation elements that are unique to your hotel operations. Click to view delivery robots or service+delivery robots.
Still unsure?
We are able to conduct a short trial for you to fully assess the capabilities of our delivery robots and whether automation will bring about desired results. Simply contact us here.