Just give me a damn room key! How technology is ruining the hotel experience

Nothing puts a smile on my face – bar, perhaps, an ascendent Aussie dollar or a European seat sale actually extends across May through October – like a hotel receptionist handing over a chunky room key.

The kind of oversized hunk of brass that looks like it was hewn from a tuba using an adze. Preferably shackled to a granite keyring you could use to smash-and-grab the luxury jewellery boutique in the basement.

Common, in grand old dames of Alpine hospitality, but rarely encountered in modern Australian travel, except when it comes to the toilet facilities at remote and fear-inducing outback cafes.

Why does such voluminous room-access hardware delight me so?

Because it’s a portent of the analogue bliss I can expect in the room. It means that when I reach said room, I’ll be able to illuminate it using an equally chunky brass switch.

It means I’ll be able to inspect a chilled tipple in the mini bar without it trebling my bill.

And it means I’ll be able to run a bath or draw the curtains at nightfall using the opposable thumbs with which natural selection has equipped me, rather than prodding away mindlessly at a NASA-designed control panel like a monkey typing Hamlet on a ZX81.

Read the latest edition of ROAM by The Nightly here.

In the handful of decades since the dimmer switch debuted as if witchcraft, we’ve moved onto voice-activated assistants, in-room tablets, electro-chromic curtains, glass bathroom walls that frost at the prod of a button and server farms deciding whether we need ambient lighting or energising daylight mode.

Guests at FlyZoo Hotel in Hangzhou, China, now have their faces scanned on check-in and then authenticated by cameras in the lifts and at their hotel room door.

Hell, one shouty press release I recently received boasted of “a handy app with which ordering a pillow from our menu takes less than getting your Deliveroo lunch box”.

Spoiler alert: if you’re offering as many types of pillow as there are global cheeses, your punters are picking one out arbitrarily and the whole thing is just performative fawning.

Needless to say, given our thriving tech ecosystem, this stuff is rife in Australia.

The Dorsett hotels in Melbourne and Gold Coast introduced Guest Services Robots (jauntily named Tim and Tam) in late 2023.

They now handle the check-in process, distribute keys and double as concierges. That’s right, the tasks which once epitomised the human touch in customer service is now carried out by matter which rusts rather than matter which rots.

Or perishes, in the case of the glossily bobbed humanoid robots which staff the Henn‑na Hotel in Tokyo.

Frankly, it’s all starting to feel very cold. Both in the metaphorical and literal sense.

I’ve now lost count of the number of times I’ve slept in the spa robe because I can’t get the room temperature to climb above minus 20 despite the steamy weather outside.

And, with the digital revolution still at larval stage, before long, words such as these will have been written by a strip of silicon in a titanium safe in a far-flung corner of Andromeda, controlled by the whims of Elon Musk’s preserved remains – it’ll only get worse.

I have a solution. The industry tells us that this gargantuan amount of tech is about maximising guest choice: so, then, let’s use it to offer choice over how much tech we actually engage. As I see it, give me three simple check-in options : ‘Blissfully Analogue’, ‘Digitally Enhanced’ and ‘Confoundingly Futuristic’.

A flesh-and-blood human at reception then pushes a button and the room configures accordingly whilst I make my way there - preferably moving along with a key that makes it look like I’ve two cricket balls wedged in my pocket.