Taken fromo irobt.comMy colleague Jeremy Greenwood has convinced me that advances in household technology have yielded tremendous benefits. And I’ll admit it: I love my vacuum-cleaning robot (the Roomba). Labor intensive vacuuming is, at least for me, a thing of the past.
But I just realized something rather odd: I have never seen a Roomba used to clean a hotel room. Why? The puzzle only deepens when you realize that hotels are avid users of other labor-saving devices, including dishwashers, washing machines, and dryers.
Here are seven theories:
1. Quality: Hotel staff do a better job vacuuming than the robot can. But any frequent hotel guest will object that current methods just aren’t that thorough.
2. Demand: Hotels rarely vacuum the rooms. (See #1.)
3. Social status: Hotel guests don’t want clean carpets, but rather they want people whose job is to clean up after them.
4. Information asymmetry: If clean carpets are tough to verify, then customers may rationally demand visible evidence that the carpets are being cleaned. Seeing someone pushing around a big old vacuum-cleaner provides this information. (And we are less resistant to technical change in the hotel kitchen or laundry, because those activities necessarily occur behind closed doors.)
5. Unionization: Unions have sometimes resisted labor-saving devices. Indeed, this is why I’m not allowed to use a Roomba to spruce up my U. Penn office. But it is hard to believe that hotel unions are as powerful as Penn’s unions. Beyond this: Surely management can negotiate an efficient outcome, perhaps by sharing Roomba-generated cost savings with their workers.
6. Capital-skill complementarity: This argument suggests that operating a Roomba is beyond the abilities of hotel cleaning staff. But honestly, if even a Ph.D. economist can operate one, they aren’t that complicated.
7. Capital scarcity: The Roomba — while labor-saving — is slow. The scarce resource is not labor, but unoccupied hotel rooms, and anything that slows down room turnover is too costly.
I don’t find any of these too compelling, but the most promising candidate is No. 7, combined with the fact that implementing Roomba-based vacuuming will change the workflow of hotel cleaning staff. Numbers 2 and 3 may also be part of the story. But there must be a more compelling answer. What is it?
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You forgot one important factor (especially for the hotel business): guests will likely steal the robots.
For the same reason that you’ll never see a GE dishwasher or fridge in a restaurant kitchen.
The challenges that hotel guests can leave behind, the need for a unit that operates in heavy demand for long periods of time, the reliability of fancy gizmos… all militate against something as relatively ‘consumer’ as a Roomba in an industrial environment.
I think a real person is required for hotel vacuuming because in hotel rooms people might often leave things on the floor that require a human’s judgement to know whether or not they should be vacuumed up. What if my diamond earring fell to the floor and I left it there unknowingly? Would a Roomba know the difference between that and a candy wrapper? I’d rather trust the maid to that one.
If the idea would be that the staff would start the roomba upon entering the room while he/she replaces soaps, coffee etc, wipes off tops of sink, tables etc it would sound right but considering that staff probably only vacuum certain areas which are visibly unkempt, it would be much quicker than a roomba. So then what’s the point if he/she then has to come back to the room to collect the roomba when it’s done
Theft and or vandalism are the primary reasons:
Theft: Let’s face it, these are still hot gadgets that are costly. I have a docking charger station at home, and usually travel with an extra large duffle bag because it is easier to pack…. someone in my similar situation may not be as honest as I am.
Vandalism: The uninitiated (minors and ludites) would take one for a “spin” to see what it can do.
To avoid either one of these scenarios, hotel management would require a person to monitor the units… which is not cost-effective.
#8 It would be hard to nail down a Roomba like everything else in the room.
I assume this system would require a Roomba in each hotel room, so that it was not impossible to manage.
If it takes 5 minutes for a maid to vacuum a room at 8 dollars an hour, it would take 600 days of the maid vacuuming every day to recoup the costs.
Do we expect a longer than 2 year life span for the roomba? What about the time value of the money spent on the roombas?
The way they could make it work is to use the time that the Roomba is in your room with as a product demo and advertising for iRobot and try to sell Roombas to the customers…
A roomba seems logistically impossible for a hotel, at first glance.
Would you have one per room? Would guests mind it operating automatically around them? Could it be set to run only when the guests are out of the room? Do Hotels want to pay $100-$300 per room for roombas?
The rooms need to be cleaned anyway, linens changed, etc. WIth the cleaning staff already coming to every room, every day, is there much incremental cost for manual vacuuming?
For the open spaces, you don’t want roombas roaming the halls. They would be a safety hazard, getting in the way and underfoot of guests with luggage. They would be an easy item for theft. They might also catch elevators and roam about to places unexpected leaving some floors over clean (a gang of roombas on the 13th floor perhaps?) and others devoid of mechanical help.
Perhaps I lack sufficient imagination, but it seems like the using roombas in hotels is completely impractical.
Maybe because, while walking down a hall, someone vacuuming can step aside, but a Roomba might not get out of the way?