Hilton Introduces New Robot Concierge
Jennifer Billock March 10, 2016
Guests at the Hilton McLean in Virginia are now able to interact with a small robot concierge.
Forget waiting in lines at the front desk or getting incorrect information from an ill-informed employee. The Hilton McLean in Virginia is putting an end to that — and delighting customers in the process.
The hotel recently introduced a new staff member, a two-foot-tall interactive robot named Connie (the robot is named after Hilton’s founder, Conrad). Connie acts as a concierge at the hotel, answering site-specific questions and making suggestions for what to do outside the hotel. According to USA Today, the overall goal of using Connie is to eliminate customer gripes (like waiting in line), make hotel operations more efficient and give guests a fun experience. Connie can make eye contact, gesture with its body, speak and reflect a range of emotions.
“It’s trying to see the person as well as hear the person,” said Rob High, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM, the company that created Connie. “It is itself vocalizing and it’s using its arm gestures and body language. When it is asked ‘where’s the elevator?’, it says it’s down the hall to the left while pointing down the hall to the left.”
But don’t worry — use of the robot is not designed to eliminate jobs at the hotel.
“This isn’t about reducing staff,” said Jim Holthouser, Hilton’s executive vice president for global brands. “That’s not where our minds are whatsoever. But if you can take 100 different routine questions off the front desk, at the end of the day, it helps them answer phones faster, it helps them check people in faster, it frees them up to actually deliver hospitality.”
[Photo: Hilton]
My partner is a Cles d'Ors Concierge in a five-star luxury hotel in a major US city. They have already seen Concierge desks removed in other, formerly high-end hotels, and replaced with so-called "tour desks" and outsourced third party desks. Now robots? Perhaps it's one step above the touch-screens that limited service hotels like Courtyard and Renaissance have been using for years now, but it's not people, and it's not personalized. I think this says more about the reduction and elimination of services in formerly full-service hotels like Hilton than it does about technology replacing humans. Look at the quotes from Hilton executives - they're not replacing a Concierge, they're taking a load off the front-desk clerks. So they're admitting they have no intention of providing Concierge services to their guests.
It frees up the agent to actually deliver hospitality. This is the same story the airlines gave when they introunced automated technologies. Now look how many jobs have been eliminated. You can bet this is where this is actually going.