How would you feel if in one of your travels, robots will be the ones to tend to your needs in the hotel where you are checked in—from welcoming you at the reception to serving food at the buffet?
Well, this idea is not at all farfetched. In fact, more and more hotels are turning to robots to run the business, prompting hotel owners and experts to re-examine the future of the hospitality sector.
In the United States, for instance, the Hilton McLean hotel in Virginia has employed a robot powered by IBM's human-mimicking Watson computer as its concierge.
In Belgium, the Marriott Hotel in Ghent has a tiny robot called "Mario" that greets guests in 19 languages, and even guards the buffet.
The robot fever has not just affected hotels. Cruise ships like the Royal Carribean have also incredibly used intelligent machines to mix cocktails for their guests.
During a recent major hotel industry trade event, the ITB Berlin, Oxford University's Carl Benedikt Frey, an expert on technology and employment, affirmed that automation is really the trend nowadays across different industries.
"A lot of jobs considered non-automatable in the past are now considered to be automatable," Frey said during the trade event, as quoted by CNN.
To map out what the future holds for various industries in the face of increasing automation, Frey and the other delegates listed down different travel and tourism jobs and ranked them based on vulnerability to being replaced by robots.
The delegates deemed that tour guides face gloomy prospects, although this still depends on the circumstances.
"Someone standing on a bus with a microphone and someone riding on a horse with you across the Alps are very different," Frey said. "The first is quite automatable, the second is not."
Because they provide human touch that robots can definitely not provide, recreational therapists, such as those who work in wellness resorts, ended up in the safe end of the ranking.
