Expert Views (6)

A fully automated hotel is not the future of hospitality. It is a different product category entirely and comparing the two does a disservice to both. The self checkout analogy is bit construed in my opinion. Self-checkout did not evolve retail. It created a parallel lane for a specific transaction at a specific price point. It did not replace the sommelier who remembers your preferences or the associate who notices you need help before you ask. Those experiences became more valuable. The same dynamic is playing out in hospitality. Keyless entry and AI tools have found genuine utility, not because they removed humans, but because they gave team members time to focus on the moments that define a stay. What concerns me is the dreaming that eliminating human employees is somehow beneficial. In luxury hospitality, that is not a feature. It is the removal of the product itself. The human free hotel will find its market in some budget segments, transactional formats. But that is a different business. For those of us in luxury, lifestyle or full-service hotels the risk is losing our sanity and trying to automate the very thing guests chose us for.

As a hotel General Manager, I see the human-free hotel as an evolution in efficiency, but not a replacement for hospitality. Automation can significantly improve the guest journey by streamlining check-in, room access, payments, and routine service requests. For certain market segments, particularly budget, airport, and highly tech-oriented travelers, a largely automated model may be both practical and profitable.

However, hospitality has always been about more than transactions. The true value of a hotel is often demonstrated when plans change, challenges arise, or a guest needs personalized attention. Service recovery, empathy, anticipation, and the ability to create memorable experiences remain uniquely human capabilities. These qualities are especially important in luxury and upscale hospitality, where relationships and emotional connection drive loyalty and rate premiums.

The future is unlikely to be human versus technology. Instead, the strongest operating models will use technology to remove repetitive tasks so employees can focus on higher-value guest interactions. The real risk is not automation itself, but viewing the elimination of people as the goal. Hotels can automate processes, but hospitality, at its core, still depends on human connection.

I have no problem with hotels using more technology. Guest apps, keyless entry and digital check-in can make things easier for guests and save my team a lot of repetitive work.

But a hotel with no people involved in the guest journey is different. Especially in luxury hospitality, I don’t see it as an improvement.

At Sole Mio Boutique Hotel & Wellness, when guests come back, they rarely mention the technology. They remember a person. Someone who remembered how they like their coffee, checked on them after a long journey or simply made them feel welcome.

For me, that is not an extra service. It is part of what a luxury hotel sells.

Automation should remove the tasks that don’t need a person, so our teams have more time for the ones that do. That’s where I see its real value.

I don’t think the future of hotels has to be about choosing between technology and people. We should use technology where it makes sense, but be careful not to automate the part of hospitality that guests actually come back for.

Use technology to make hospitality better, just don’t remove the hospitality.

I believe a human free hotel may become a viable accommodation model, but I do not believe it represents the evolution of hospitality.

Hospitality, at its essence, is deeply human. Particularly in luxury, it is not simply about beautiful surroundings, flawless efficiency or personalisation. It is about intuition, anticipating an unspoken need, reading a moment, knowing when to engage and when to step away. It is about making someone feel genuinely recognised, understood and cared for.

Technology has an important role in our future. It should remove friction, simplify the transactional and quietly enable our colleagues to devote more time to what matters most, the guest. The finest technology, much like the finest service, should often be almost invisible.

The risk is that as we progressively remove human interaction, guests adapt to expect less of it, and we mistake those diminished expectations for evidence that human service is no longer valued. That is where the proposition becomes self-fulfilling.

There will undoubtedly be a place for highly automated hotels. But luxury should aspire to something different. As technology becomes ubiquitous, genuine human attention, empathy and discretion will become increasingly precious.

Technology can make a stay effortless. It takes a person to make it meaningful.

Japan ran this experiment already. The Henn na Hotel opened in 2015 with 243 robots and by 2019 had removed more than half. Not because guests objected. Because the robots created work rather than absorbed it. Someone had to fix the machine that could not understand a snore.

Retail ran it too. Dollar General pulled self-checkout from around 12,000 stores. A year later shrink was down and gross margin up 78 basis points. The automation had been costing money and calling it savings.

My question as a hotelier is: can a building run without staff? Obviously. Shenzhen will prove it in 2027 and at a certain price it will work. That is a different product from ours, not a cheaper version of it.

The harder question is the one the industry avoids. Robots are not coming for luxury service. We hollowed it out first. A decade of thinning teams and scripting whatever remained has produced service a machine can plausibly imitate.

The test, for me, was never whether a task can be automated. It is whether the guest is paying for it to be done by someone who could have chosen otherwise.

Nobody automates a category that is working.

I see the human free hotel as neither true evolution nor the future of hospitality. Technology can remove friction, improve efficiency and give guests greater control, but it cannot replace empathy, intuition or genuine human connection. The real evolution is not a hotel without people but it is a hotel where technology works quietly in the background, allowing our teams to spend more meaningful time with guests. If we prioritise automation over connection, the human-free hotel could indeed become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hospitality must remain human at heart.