Unit 2 READING

1 Read the article. Choose the best title – a, b or c.

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When Henn na Hotel opened in 2015 in Nagasaki, Japan, it immediately hit the headlines. This wasn’t a
hotel like any other because most of the staff were robots.
Back then, as soon as you arrived, you were welcomed by a robot receptionist. After check-in, a robot porter
took your luggage to your room. And you didn’t need a key because the door to your room recognized your
face and opened automatically. Another robot was responsible for room service, although it wasn’t able to
change the sheets. And the robot concierge gave you information about meals and events, but it wasn’t able
to book theatre tickets or order a taxi. The hotel still needed people for its security and the cameras were
watched by human security guards who made sure that everyone was safe.

At first, guests loved the idea. It was a great advantage for customers that the hotel used robots because it
was cheaper than hotels with human workers. At the beginning of 2019, there were 243 robots working in
Henn na Hotel but the management decided to lay off half of them. It turns out that some of the robots
created problems instead of solving them. For example, the robot assistant that was in each hotel room
couldn’t answer many of the guests’ questions. And sometimes at night, it heard guests snoring and thought
they were saying something so responded and woke the guests up. The robots that were responsible for
check-in weren’t able to scan guests’ passports, so the guests had to do it themselves. The porters could
only reach 24 of the 100 rooms and had terrible problems when it snowed or rained.
Henn na Hotel chose to employ more human staff but there are more and more new hotels around the
world where robots work alongside people: for example, Alibaba Future Hotel in China and Hotel Sky
in South Africa.

a Hotels in trouble
b The future of tourism
c Is this the future of hotels?

76 3 PHOTOCOPIABLE © Oxford University Press

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