Keenon Robotics (擎朗智能), a delivery robot startup, recently announced it had reached strategic cooperation with Wyndham Hotel Group, the world’s largest, and will become its official commercial robot supplier in the Greater China market.
Notably, Wyndham is the second hotel group to partner with Keenon in a month.
In late February, Keenon signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Chinese hotel chain brand Dossen to digitalize its management and help improve customer satisfaction.
In an official WeChat post today, Keenon said it has teamed up with several leading domestic and foreign hotel chains to provide them with butler robots, including Wyndham, Hilton, Dossen and Jinjiang.
Among them, Wyndham, a New Jersey-headquartered hotel and resort operator, has become the largest hotel group in the world.
It has a diversified business portfolio, spanning 95 countries and regions across six continents and operating 9,000 hotels of all sorts.
Keenon has been riding a robotic wave since 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. This compelled many hoteliers to deploy robotics and cloud services at scale as part of a shift toward a contact-less economy and digitalization.
Keenon’s in-hotel delivery solutions are mainly adopted in conjunction with unmanned locker, elevator control and intercom system and takeaway platform.
By pairing robots with unmanned lockers, hotels not only can serve guests when part of their staff are off the clock, but they also can generate extra income.
Delivery of meals, snacks, drinks and other merchandise, which are not often in stock, is poised to become easier as Keenon’s robotic fleet plans its own route between pick-up and drop-off points, and deposit the items within an unmanned locker.
This not just help the hotel save up on labor costs but also better protect customer privacy.
Equipped with SLAM and other technologies, Keenon robots are able to navigate hotel corridors on their own, and even ride elevators to deliver across floors.
Deliver riders also can look to robots to free them from the burdensome last-mile delivery. Meals stored in the robot’s cabins will arrive at the doorsteps of the customers after riders input the hotel room number of the receivers on the robot’s interface.
The Shanghai-based startup said this design effectively minimizes the chance of missed orders while also promising better customer privacy protection.
Nonetheless, Keenon didn’t say with which takeout platform it began to cooperate, ele.me or Meituan.
It also has changed the single-cabin setup of its butler robot into a double-cabin and even four-cabin layout, enhancing the delivery efficiency by a whopping 300%, said Keenon.
This enables the robot to deliver multiple orders on a single errand, alleviating the pressure for on-time delivery during peak hours when the hotel is short-handed.
