When you walk into the Henn-na Hotel outside Tokyo, you’ll be met by a pair of feathered velociraptor receptionists. The dinos are robots, of course, and it’s the first act of a hotel stay that’s free of human interaction.
The hotel is the second robot-operated hotel to launch in Japan, and is located just outside the Disney theme park in Urayasu. The robot-hotel is planning on expanding around the world over the next five years, reports The Japan Times. Henn-na is a play on a word for strange in Japanese. During the opening ceremony for the hotel, the CEO, Hideo Sawada said “[the goal] is not about being strange, it’s about transforming and evolving.”
There are 140 robots staffing the hotel, with a skeleton crew of seven people to handle emergencies in any of the 100 rooms that the robots can’t handle. A robot porter carries your bags to your rooms, and robots handle window cleaning and vacuuming:
The robot hotels are owned by the HIS travel agency, and the company has made significant changes between the robot hotel it opened in Nagasaki in 2015 and the Tokyo branch. The new hotel is distinctly dinosaur-themed. Both of the receptionists are slightly outlandish robot velociraptors. And although they’re too large to be totally accurate, the bots do have feathers. The dinos are also multilingual, speaking Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.
Each room also comes with a dinosaur-egg sized robot with an AI that is basically the hotel-room version of an Alexa or google home bot. Tapia has blinking eye animations and can answer questions about the weather and control appliances in your hotel room. It’s made by MJI Robotics, and while it’s offered to customers as a solid white body, the hotel version has egg-shell cracks and colorful polka dots. In the promo video, Tapia can also chose a song from your music based on what you’re humming. It’s not totally clear if it can do that in the hotel, but it can definitely wake you up with some cutesy eye animations.
