In this opinion piece, Lucy Lin, host of the Emerging Tech Unpacked podcast, reflects on her stay in a Beijing hotel where service robots and smart-room automation revealed how technology is reshaping hospitality – not by replacing people, but by redefining how humans and machines work together to improve the guest experience.
I didn’t expect the future of hospitality to arrive in the form of a waist-high robot, quietly humming in a Beijing hotel corridor at 11pm. Yet there it was: a gleaming little cylinder that had just ridden the lift by itself, phoned my room, and was now waiting patiently outside my door with two bottles of water.
This wasn’t a luxury concept hotel. It was a perfectly ordinary, mid-range property catering to business travellers and domestic tourists. And that’s what struck me most: in China, robotics in hotels is no longer a gimmick reserved for trade-show demos and brand flagships. It’s increasingly part of the everyday guest experience.
Inside my room, the “automation surprise” continued. Curtains glided upwards as soon as the door was opened, lights dimmed and brightened from the touch of the bedside panel, and of course and my favourite, the toilet seat was heated. What used to be the preserve of high-end smart homes has quietly filtered into mainstream hotel stock. As a guest, I felt less like I was staying in a hotel with tech, and more like I was staying inside the tech itself.
Not everything on this trip, however, could be solved by circuits and sensors. At one of the hotels we stayed at, our toilet unexpectedly clogged. No robot came gliding to the rescue. Instead, a very human plumber appeared at the door, tools in hand, to deal with a messy, very analogue problem. It was a useful reminder that while robots can handle many tasks, there are still situations where we instinctively turn to people and their judgement, improvisation and empathy.
That contrast helped clarify how robots actually fit into the hotel ecosystem. My delivery robot wasn’t there to ‘wow’ me with AI small talk. Its job was to run simple, repetitive errands: food, bottled water, extra cutlery, the kinds of routine requests that typically fall to the most junior, lowest-paid staff. For those mundane runs, the robot was brilliant – fast, discreet and reliably on time. Automating them doesn’t remove hospitality, it changes where human hospitality shows up.
In my experience, staff in these hotels weren’t disappearing – they were redeployed. Instead of ferrying bottled water up and down lifts, they were in the lobby troubleshooting, welcoming guests, answering questions, and handling customer enquiries and problems that no robot can (yet) gracefully solve, such as blocked toilets to complex booking issues. The more the robots handled the routine, the more time humans seemed to have for the relational.
Watch her interaction with a room service robot in a Beijing hotel
Of course, there are trade-offs. A robot delivery is efficient and contactless, but it won’t share a restaurant tip, laugh about the jet lag, or offer an unscripted kindness. When technology is badly implemented – confusing control panels, over-sensitive sensors, lights that refuse to stay off – it adds friction rather than removing it. The line between “futuristic” and “frustrating” can be thin.
Yet, leaving China, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen a glimpse of where hotels globally are heading. As labour markets tighten and guest expectations rise, more properties will view service robots and intelligent rooms not as novelties but as operational necessities. The winners will be those who treat robotics as an invisible backbone and people as the visible heart.
For travellers, that means we’ll increasingly judge hotels on how smoothly the human and the machine work together. Did the robot make life easier? Did the room’s automation feel intuitive? And, perhaps most importantly, when something went wrong, was there a human ready to step in with genuine care?
If my Beijing robot – and that very human plumber – are any indication, the future of hotels won’t be humans versus robots. It will be humans working alongside robots, with the best properties using automation not to replace hospitality, but to elevate the customer experience for their guests.
