Henn na Hotel

Henn na Hotel (変なホテル, “strange hotel”) is a Japanese hotel chain known for robots at its front desks. The first opened on July 17, 2015 on the grounds of the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Nagasaki Prefecture, with 72 rooms in its first phase. Huis Ten Bosch described it as a low-cost hotel that would cut labor costs with automation and service robots, with robots from Kokoro, Aldebaran Robotics and Yaskawa Electric planned for the front desk, porter service, lockers and room cleaning.¹ Guinness World Records recognized it as the first hotel where robots worked, Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported.² The brand’s group site, run by H.I.S. Hotel Holdings, now lists 22 Henn na hotels: 20 in Japan, one in Seoul and one in New York.³

In December 2017 the first hotel’s general manager said it ran 144 rooms around the clock with seven staff, five on any given day, against 30 at opening. Guests checked in at a counter terminal by saying their name into its microphone; it pulled up the booking for them to confirm and sign, in about 20-odd seconds.⁴ Not every robot lasted. In January 2019 the hotel was reported to have retired more than half of its 243 robots, including in-room assistants and humanoid concierge robots that could not answer basic questions, The Week reported, citing The Wall Street Journal.⁵ The hotel’s own account to Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun was that robot types had fallen from a peak of 27 to 15, that machines installed four years earlier no longer satisfied guests, that some were limited by water or weather, and that its third building, completed in December 2018, took only robot vacuum cleaners.²

Today the group site lists a dinosaur robot assisting check-in at 10 hotels, a humanoid robot at 5 and a projected “Holograms of Light” faceless check-in at 4.³ At Henn na Hotel Tokyo Ginza, two multilingual humanoid robots and human staff welcome guests, who then pay and collect their room keys at a kiosk,⁶ and the hotel says staff are always at reception.⁷ MetaRoles covers the chain in AI and robot receptionists and in how a building concierge’s job is shared with robots and AI: the kiosk does the transaction, while the robot on the counter mostly does the greeting.