The reception workers at the Henn na – or “Weird” – Hotel gaze blankly at guests.

Some of the uncanny staff members look like Japanese women. Others are talking Velociraptors. All of them are robots.

In fact, the novelty Tokyo hotel is known for being the first in the world to be “run by” machines. They speak different languages and carry out front-of-house tasks such as greetings, check-in and tourist information.

Bosses have claimed the robots could eventually yield savings of 75 percent on labor costs.

One time cost of a robot, $2,000, versus $30,000 for a human annually.

Tellingly, however, the hotel still relies on a small army of human “stagehands” for the important jobs that require the most manpower. They take care of mishaps, tidy up bedrooms, water the plants and keep hard-to-reach areas free of cobwebs.

Until now, deploying robots has seemed more like a gimmick than a serious strategy to hospitality bosses, who aren’t interested in using machines that will only slow them down.

Yet with the technology improving rapidly, many are now re-examining how automation could shake up the industry.

One veteran executive says this is primarily being driven by labour costs, which have surged in Europe and the US.

Travelodge said last year that it aimed to partly mitigate £21m of higher costs – resulting from a rising minimum wage and increasing employer National Insurance contributions – by ramping up its use of robot vacuum cleaners across its estate.

Technology also allows hotels to provide a more personalised offering and experiences focused on “wellness”.

“Sleep and wellbeing are also becoming more mainstream consumer priorities,” the executive says. “Fundamentally, what hotels are selling is a good night’s sleep.”

Along with devices such as self-service kiosks, more futuristic gadgets are starting to appear.

In Newcastle, the Maldron Hotel claims to have doubled room service revenues by introducing a wheeled “ButlerBot” that delivers food and other treats directly to a guest’s door.

One start-up riding the wave towards high-tech personalisation is Nook, founded by Piers Millar, a young British entrepreneur.

He argues that the modern hotel room should follow the example of Waymo’s driverless taxis in San Francisco, California, which allow passengers to set the car’s temperature and play their own music – with these preferences automatically remembered when they next hail a vehicle.

“We really want to drive efficiency through technology but it’s also about giving people a much more personalised experience,” Millar says.

His company’s big idea is to repeat the trick in the hotel business. Since the start of August, it has been trialling a concept room at the Superhero Hotel, formerly the Commodore, in San Francisco and it has signed a deal to open in London as well.

Guests can select their preferred lighting, music and temperatures of their room and mattress before they check in, so it’s all set up when they arrive.

The bed also collects data on your heart rate and sleep quality and will optimize itself over time to ensure a better rest.

Millar ultimately wants to build a new hotel chain where automation will allow staff to ditch the drudgery and focus more on guests.

The company’s next frontier, housekeeping, remains largely untouched by automation. It is also the biggest labour cost for hotel owners.

In major hotel chains, a housekeeper will spend anywhere between 20 and 45 minutes turning around a room once a guest has checked out.

The prize from any time savings here could be substantial, with even a few minutes per room adding up to potentially major cost savings.

Likewise, cleaning a hotel-room bathroom is a tricky task for robots. But options for automation do exist.

For instance, self-cleaning toilet cubicles are now commonplace in some European cities such as Paris.

These “superloos” function similarly to dishwashers, with the door locking automatically after a person exits and a wash cycle cleaning and drying the entire toilet fixture and floor.

Millar believes they could be the best solution for hotels, although the significant plumbing means they cannot easily be retrofitted to older hotels.

Another area with potential is bedding. In budget hotels, it takes about 20 minutes to clean a room, with changing the bed taking up up to half of this time.

But Millar and his team at Nook are developing a “self-changing” bed that will be able to strip itself, with a housekeeper then only required to clip on new sheets.

Similar shifts towards robots are starting to happen in other parts of the hospitality industry as well.

British start-up Kaikaku has been pioneering industrial kitchen appliances and software that speed up the production of food.

It has started out with a conveyor-belt system that makes fresh salad bowls but in future will target other products such as burgers.

Josef Chen, its chief executive, says: “You want to target restaurants where the bulk of revenue is coming from a single product that is made through a very repetitive process.

“The idea is that eventually, everything could be so automated that there’s nothing left for staff to focus on except the customers.”

Kaikaku was recently acquired by Reef, an American tech firm backed by Japanese giant SoftBank.

The company says its machines can cut labour costs by 70pc and make 360 salad bowls an hour – equivalent to one every 10 seconds.

This sort of technology is particularly attractive to hotels and restaurants that have faced significant tax rises under Labour, says Allen Simpson, the chief executive of UKHospitality.

However, he fears the sector is under such strain that many venues will end up laying off humans.

“You want to be in a situation where the robots take out the lower-productivity work,” he says. “But we’re actually in a position where the robots just take the job and the person isn’t redeployed because the employer can’t afford it.”

However, while there are clearly jobs that robots can handle that don’t require a human touch – such as the robo-butlers in Newcastle – many guests still expect a human face in hospitality.

Simpson points to two cocktail bars that recently opened in south London. One was run by two passionate bartenders who made their drinks the usual way, while the other was automated and sold canned cocktails.

“The canned bar went bust really quickly because – even though a Negroni is just three ingredients mixed together – people still want a human to have mixed their drink.”