AN army of robots is set to invade a popular hotel chain.

Travelodge, whose five York hotels include York Central Micklegate, York Hull Road and York Tadcaster city hotels, says a squadron of hundreds of RoboVac Buddies have been assigned to the group’s 35 Travelodge Yorkshire hotels today (February 9).

The multi-million pound UK collective investment of 7,500 RoboVac Buddies is  designed to support the company’s housekeeping teams – who have to clean up to nearly 44,000 rooms every day, 365 days of the year.

The firm says it's to help lighten the workload for its housekeeping team members, who collectively vacuum the distance from York to New York every day.

The hotel chain teamed up with KILLIS Ltd, a Sheffield based company that specialises in manufacturing specialist cleaning equipment and together engineered the UK’s first industrial RoboVac designed for a busy hotel.

This laborious mission took nine months to complete and included the production of five prototypes before the birth of the Travelodge RoboVac Buddy – as this is no ordinary RoboVac.

It has robust features to enable it to withstand the daily heavy duty requirements of working in a busy hotel.

 

 

Craig Bonnar, Travelodge, Chief Executive said: “We are very excited to kick start 2022 by revolutionising the hospitality sector and supporting our housekeeping teams with the roll-out of the UK’s first hotel RoboVac Buddy recruitment programme. Housekeeping is the most important and physically demanding job at Travelodge and we are always looking for low cost and innovative ways to support our colleagues. Automating vacuuming with the introduction of the Travelodge RoboVac Buddies is a fun, win-win solution which helps us to drive a greener, cleaner and more efficient room clean. The army of Travelodge RoboVac Buddies have settled in really well and are a massive hit with our hotel teams and customers.”

Lira Namoni, Travelodge RoboVac Buddy Trainer, said: “On behalf of my colleagues across all of the UK Travelodge hotels, we are thrilled to welcome our new RoboVac Buddies. They are just incredible and made such a significant difference to housekeeping duties. They have now all completed their induction training and passed their probation and are just raring to get to work.

The company says there have been a couple of casualties during training, a RoboVac Buddy at Gatwick Airport Travelodge took a wrong turn and was found in Spain.

Another RoboVac Buddy at Cambridge Orchard Park Travelodge had a technical glitch during its reception cleaning shift and bolted out of the hotel onto the streets.