SoftBank Robotics working with cleaning crews in the hospitality sector.

The Sheraton Heathrow is a 4-star luxury hotel, less than 15 minutes from London Heathrow Airport, in the UK.

The hotel strives to give its’ guests, (around 4-500 per day), a fantastic stay and was looking for a solution to help them achieve the highest quality standards with their cleaning operations.

The hotel has a lot of long corridors, around 1.6km, which are time consuming to clean. There was a need to make it easier for staff by giving them access to high tech solutions to help with their day to day operations.

Not only did they need a solution which allowed them to focus and spend time on other areas of the hotel and tasks, such as cleaning guest bedrooms, but also something quiet as they have lots of guests sleeping in the daytime.

Steven Foster, from Omni Facilities Management, the management team who look after the Sheraton hotel says,  “When looking at quality standards, we noticed that there were large areas of carpet cleaning that needed to be cleaned in the hotel. If you take the corridors as an example, they are long, and they require a lot of attention. This is where we started using the Whiz autonomous vacuum cleaner, by SoftBank Robotics.  We have noticed that by using Whiz, it has started to pull the pile of the carpet back up and reduced the amount of dust that we are seeing in the corridors. Overall it has been a very successful project that we have embarked on.

From the Whiz reporting, we can tell how often the machine is used, how much space it has covered, where it has been. It is very reliable, it doesn’t call in sick, it does its job. I think our team members, ask them now, and it would be very difficult for me to take the machine away from them. I would describe it as a new team mate.”

In addition, General Manager of the Sheraton Heathrow Hotel, René Mooren, says,

“When I ask Dorota, the head of Housekeeping in my hotel, she says it is just a fantastic team member, or team members as they call them now – “Bob” and “Matt” – they are fully integrated and they love them because they take a lot of tasks away so that they can focus more on the more complicated tasks – they love them!

We get a lot of guest comments, all quite positive, curious, but not one negative comment. All very positive comments.”

To find out more about SoftBank Robotics or the Whiz autonomous vacuum cleaner, please visit the website Welcome to SoftBank Robotics EMEA