Located in Hangzhou, China, the 290-room FlyZoo Hotel was built by Alibaba’s online travel platform, Fliggy, along with other Alibaba Group business units.
It all starts with the FlyZoo mobile app. From there, travelers can book their stays, choose the floor they want and even the direction their room faces. For foreign passport holders, check-in requires just a few simple steps at a kiosk with help from hotel staff. But Chinese travelers can check in via the app and go straight to their room.
Fans of sf great Harry Harrison may recall the Robotnik from his 1970 novel The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge:
As soon as we had landed and our baggage had been disgorged, a robocab took us to the Dosadan-GIup Robotnik. This was the local branch of a planet-wide chain of hotels that specialized in non-human service. Everything was mechanized and computerized. Human beings presumably visited them once in a while to check the gauges and empty the tills, but I had never seen one although I had used these hotels quite often, for many obvious reasons. I had occasionally seen other guests entering or leaving but we had avoided each other's gaze like plague carriers. The Robotniks were islands of privacy in a sea of staring eyes.
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