The first time you step into the Alilys Future Hotel in Longgang, Shenzhen, you may feel as if you’ve walked into the wrong place.
There is no one at the front desk. Only a vertical screen stands at the entrance, bathing the entire space in cold white light.
Face recognition, identity verification, key card retrieval — check-in is completed in three steps.
From a technical standpoint, there is little to fault. The whole process is as simple as buying a bottle of water from a vending machine.
The same elevator carries office workers during the day and bar-goers at night. Karaoke rooms, mahjong parlors, and late-night food stalls are all housed in the same building. There is no elevator access control, meaning anyone who enters the building can reach the guestroom floors.
Yet Alilys Future Hotel is not an isolated case. In recent years, unmanned hotels have once again become a frequent talking point for both investors and industry insiders, emerging as one of the most discussed topics in hospitality.
Hotel groups such as Jin Jiang, H World, and Dossen have all entered the space, while a new wave of startups is rejoining the race with updated technologies and business models. Amid the renewed hype, the key question remains: how viable is this new chapter for unmanned hotels?
Unmanned hotels are not a new concept. A decade ago, the model went through a full cycle from hype to silence.
Xbed, an unmanned hotel startup founded in 2015 by Chuntian Li, a founding member of 7 Days Inn, once raised substantial funding. But after its peak, the company gradually faded from view, almost perfectly mirroring the rise and fall of that earlier wave.
Looking back, the core narrative of the previous boom is nearly identical to today’s: replacing front desks with technology, supporting multiple properties with minimal staff, cutting costs through standardized modules, and selling an investment story built on “asset-light operations and rapid replication.”
What ultimately drove many projects to exit was a systemic underestimation of operational complexity. Security risks, asset loss, disputes, guest complaints, and equipment maintenance all pushed costs and risks back to a point where human intervention became unavoidable.
Policy and regulatory constraints proved to be the real bottleneck. In the past, self-service check-in systems were required to be paired with manual identity verification, meaning unmanned hotels could only exist in a “partially unmanned” form.
Despite ongoing controversy, unmanned hotels are once again triggering a rapid expansion wave in China’s accommodation market.
From the broader perspective of smart hotels, this sector has entered the fast lane. The global market was valued at around USD 15 billion in 2024 and is expected to surpass USD 50 billion by 2030. China is moving even faster, with the domestic market projected to exceed RMB 300 billion (about USD 43.2 billion) by 2025.
