Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#2Why Don't 99%+ of Americans use Roombas?
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#3Because vacuuming is <5% of what cleaning people do. You'd need an auto-emptying robot too, which is much harder to make. And you'd need to make it much more reliable - drastically increasing the life of the product. That's very hard.
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#4Because people would steal them the way they steal towels and other things in hotel rooms?
It'd be a crackhead's paradise -- find the nearest hotel, break two room windows in, and score a cool $600 worth of electronics in a few minutes. Score!
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#5Because people would steal them the way they steal towels and other things in hotel rooms? It'd be a crackhead's paradise -- find the nearest hotel, break two room windows in, and score a cool $600 worth of electronics in a few minutes. Score!
Why don't they do that now for the TVs or the fine art?
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#6Because people would steal them the way they steal towels and other things in hotel rooms? It'd be a crackhead's paradise -- find the nearest hotel, break two room windows in, and score a cool $600 worth of electronics in a few minutes. Score!
Why don't they do that now for the TVs or the fine art?
"fine art"?
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#7Vacuuming a hotel is a fundamentally different engineering problem than vacuuming a house in a similar way that a dish washer for a restaurant is different than for a home. The washer from where I worked was a large industrial box that worked hard and fast. A home unit would have to conserve energy and water where as the industrial unit doesn't necessarily. Customers need clean dishes NOW more than the business needs to save some single-digit percentage in energy and water costs.
Speed, capacity and throughput come into play.
I only need to clean 1 living quarters where as a maid service in a hotel has to do dozens, every day. The roomba would have to be at least as fast as the human and it is not. That's OK for home use since I'm at work so it can take all day if it wanted to. That wouldn't work out so well at a hotel where throughput matters more.
This sounds like an interesting problem for someone in operations research to tackle. I can conceive that a roomba might be useful in a hotel (for example, when the cleaning staff is going at the bathroom, let the robot loose in the room) ... but it would require some time and money to study it.
Perhaps a system where the floor has embedded RFID tags with unique serial numbers to help make the robot's job easier and more efficient, and a larger capacity bin and battery.
I'm sure iRobot is thinking about this.
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#8Wow, that is a stupid idea.
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#9Vacuuming a hotel is a fundamentally different engineering problem than vacuuming a house in a similar way that a dish washer for a restaurant is different than for a home. The washer from where I worked was a large industrial box that worked hard and fast. A home unit would have to conserve energy and water where as the industrial unit doesn't necessarily. Customers need clean dishes NOW more than the business needs…
It wouldn't have to be as fast as a human because it doesn't need to be watched and a maid could carry multiple of them. (In fact given their battery life, she'd have to.) She could clean room 1, release roomba 1 in it after she was done, move on to clean room 2 while roomba 1 worked, release roomba 2 after the end, etc.
There might be a little lag at the end of the shift though, depending on the amount of time the Roomba took to vacuum and the amount of time she took to do everything else, so she'd probably just vacuum the last room or two by hand depending.
Nonetheless, the idea is dumb for many other reasons.
Re: Why Don’t Hotels Use Roombas?
#10Wow, that is a stupid idea. http://mattmaroon.com/?p=416
Agreed. Most people use Roombas for entertainment purposes. It definitely takes more time to look after them than it would to do a better job with a vacuum.
I bought one for my wife. I kind of think of it as a pet.