One day, robots will give us our best holidays.

This Summer you might spend your holiday at a hotel. Under sustained pressure from Airbnb-type competition and technological advances, hotels are having to transform radically.

#oneday invites you through the doors to a new type of establishment.

No area is safe…not even holidays! Now it’s the hotel industry’s turn to reinvent the client experience. Faceed with tough competition, the sector is turning to technology to (re)seduce a target audience that is increasingly demanding and short on time. So will robots replace personnel or help to add value to the level of service ?

That was then.

3.08am. After an endless journey and hours of traffic jams, you finally arrive exhausted at your hotel. There’s no-one at reception to welcome you. You ring the night bell and wait. Wait for an employee to come and register you and grant the ‘open sesame’ to access your room so that you can collapse on the bed.

Maybe tomorrow all that will belong to the past.

Robots and facial recognition.

24/7, clients at the FlyZoo hotel in Hangzhou in China take just 2 minutes to get from reception into their room.

What’s the secret? Robots have replaced some of their personnel.

Clients stand 1 metre in front of droids who scan their faces and passports in a few seconds.

Once completed, the client can take the lift which also uses facial recognition and grants automatic access to the correct floor. At the door to the room, again the door will only open if it recognises the occupant’s face.

Room temperature, lighting, room service and even settling the bill…everything takes place without any human intervention.

Behind this new generation of hotel lies the giant, Alibaba.

The objective: test clients’ level of acceptance.

The technology is all set but are people ready to bypass human and social interaction in this context? That is the real challenge in this test of nature. Even knowing that in China the acceptance level for this type of technology is high and is already integrated into the lives of millions of inhabitants.

The level may not be so high for Europeans and Americans who are also trying out other artificial intelligence linked services.

Hello Connie !

In the US, the well-known hotel chain Hilton is testing a concierge robot. Connie (a reference to the hotel chain’s founder, Conrad Hilton), the Android, which is based on Watson AI developed by IBM, is there to provide information to clients about services and local activities, and to respond to requests. Rather than replacing human personnel, it frees them up to concentrate on tasks which take more time and demand a more personal service.

The Aloft Hotel in California is going down the same route. Botlr (the name derives from “bot” and ‘butler”) roams the corridors to meet clients’ needs.

Once it’s in front of your door, it calls rather than knocking and prefers to perform a little dance than receive a tip. Apparently the clients lP