Deepak Patel, 43, conducts a room inspection at the Country Inn and Suites, Baltimore North, a hotel he owns and manages with his family in Rosedale, Maryland.
Rosem Morton for NPR
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Rosem Morton for NPR
Deepak Patel, 43, conducts a room inspection at the Country Inn and Suites, Baltimore North, a hotel he owns and manages with his family in Rosedale, Maryland.
Rosem Morton for NPR
This holiday season at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, Merle Ayers is feeling especially grateful for the Whiz.
At two feet tall and 66 pounds, the powerful robot vacuum doesn’t mind working late into the night after the parties are over. The Whiz doesn’t care that it’s the holidays. It doesn’t even need a day off.
“It just needs to be cared for. We have to change the vacuum bags periodically and keep the batteries charged,” says Ayers, the hotel’s director of banquets.
Amid ongoing staffing shortages, the two robot vacuums the hotel purchased late last year for about $30,000 each are proving their worth many times over, filling gaps in both the catering department and housekeeping.
The Garden City Hotel on Long Island invested in two robot vacuums in late 2021. The autonomous vacuums allow the hotel to redeploy staff to other tasks that must be done by hand.
Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR
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Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR
The Garden City Hotel on Long Island invested in two robot vacuums in late 2021. The autonomous vacuums allow the hotel to redeploy staff to other tasks that must be done by hand.
Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR
“If we vacuum every floor with a robot, that saves one whole shift,” says Garden City Hotel managing director Grady Colin. “That’s one whole person per day that can be redeployed to do something else.”
These days, he’ll take all the help he can get.
Travel is back but hotel staff are not
Travelers have returned from the pandemic, but hotel workers have not, creating unprecedented staffing challenges for the hospitality industry. According to the Labor Department, there are 350,000 fewer people working in hotels today than there were in February 2020, before the pandemic.
It’s not for lack of trying. Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen.
“I’ve been in the hotel business for a long time,” says Colin. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Grady Colin, managing director of the Garden City Hotel, says he won’t cut back on daily room cleaning or nightly turndown service. Guests come to the hotel expecting a luxury experience, he says.
Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR
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Gabriela Bhaskar for NPR
Colin has observed that workers now want more freedom. They don’t want to be tied down to their jobs. His longtime valet parking attendant told him he no longer wanted to work evenings, because early in the pandemic when business nearly came to a standstill, he’d gotten accustomed to having dinner with his family every night.
With employees old and new, Colin has tried to be flexible.
“We’ve even tried to fill positions by saying, let’s not make it full-time,” he says. “We’ll cobble together what would have been a 40-hour shift for one person with three or four.”
Still, it’s not enough — 15% to 20% of staff positions at the hotel remain unfilled. Projecting that 2023 will be a busy year for the Garden City Hotel, Colin is considering what else can be automated beyond the vacuuming.
“I think it’s going to be the necessity to see what other products are out there,” he says. “This was a beta test for us that worked out very well.”
