(Bloomberg) -- Welcome back to Bloomberg Pursuits Amenity Watch, where we look at the exciting (and sometimes ridiculous) perks that luxury hotels are coming up with to entice people back out into the world.
It’s normally at the point of a massage when the therapist stretches and squeezes each of my knuckles individually that I start to feel emotional. It’s not because the treatment is almost over. There’s just something about being lavished with that much attention to detail that triggers an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Is anything more rarifiedfor a caretaker of young kids than feeling taken care of yourself?
At my most recent massage I reached no such moment. For one thing, the therapist never got to my hands. For another, it was a robot.
Getting a massage from a robot, it turns out, is more fun than relaxing—at least at first—and it’s a little more practical than pampering. But if the whole thing sounds like science fiction, it’s not: The 30-minute service is now bookable for $75 at the Lotte New York Palace hotel, the first hospitality partner for automated wellness brand Aescape.
Aescape is the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Eric Litman, whose foray into robotics has been roughly seven years in the making. He tells Bloomberg that he’ll ship 200 massage robots to hotels and gyms by the end of the year—including at least 10 Equinox locations—with a plan to further ramp up production in 2025.
His vision: To disrupt a slice of the global wellness industry, valued at $5.6 trillion in November 2023, with on-demand services and automation. “We are the first commercial example that we know of where robots are directly coming in contact with human bodies, in a fully autonomous way,” Litman says. He likens the experience to riding in a self-driving car. “You get in one for the first time, and you might be a little bit trepidatious watching the steering wheel move by itself,” he says. “But then you realize it’s just like a steady, safe driver. After your second or third time you just sort of forget it’s a self-driving vehicle.”
The robotic massage experience
Aescape’s robotic masseur looks a bit like a surgical robot, with white armatures that wrap around a navy blue massage table. Hovering above it in a silver metal frame are two cylinders with tiny spotlights and body-scanning sensors. The setup at the Lotte New York Palace is almost contactless. After I checked in at the Ila Only spa on the 8th floor and signed a waiver on a tablet, the receptionist showed me past the relaxation area and into a treatment room.
I was instructed to pick my size in Aescape’s proprietary loungewear—designed to reduce friction between the robot’s hands and human skin, protect for privacy and help the sensors accurately scan the body—and then use a tablet set under the face hole to get started. No slipping under a blanket, no waiting for a knock at the door, no awkward introductions.
For the next 30 minutes, I watched two orbs move across a digitized diagram of my body in parallel with the robot’s hands, pulsing in brightness to subtly convey the usual “breathe in” and “breathe out.” A menu on the left side of the screen told me what the machine was doing: introducing touch and warming up the body, stretching my intrascapular region, restoring my resting muscles.
To the right, a bar indicating the pressure level offered personalization: touch the up arrow to deepen pressure, or the down arrow to lighten it up. (It responded almost instantaneously—and much less awkwardly than a human would have.)
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There are limitations: Without thumbs or the ability to sense my specific tension points, it couldn’t focus in on the knots I chronically carry in my shoulders. That made its most convincing movements the long, gliding ones usually done with an elbow or the back of a palm—which are similar in shape to the robot’s rounded appendages. The Aescape is also limited to your back side. (Arms don’t count. Hence the absence of my beloved, doting hand massage.)
All that said, the movement was smooth and properly targeted my muscles with little to no vibration. It’s much better than, say, a Theragun with arms or a sophisticated massage chair, even if the soft whirring sound gives the experience a slightly clinical vibe.
Aescape says that 30 minutes with the robot accomplishes what a living, breathing therapist would do in 60—mostly because it can use both hands symmetrically with equal pressure rather than working one side at a time. And, indeed, I felt surprisingly limber in the hours after my massage. My willingness to experiment with higher pressure in certain spots may have had something to do with that. I probably wouldn’t have taken that chance with a human.
Not (quite) replacing humans
Aescape says its sensors can take in more than a million data points about your anatomy at any given moment during a massage, using the feed to move in tandem with your breath and adjust for any fidgeting. In the future, Litman says those body scans, along with your preferences, will get stored to your profile, so you can pick up where you left off at another location, or go through a multi-massage “content journey” that’s tailored to your fitness and recovery goals as you travel the world. And as for my knot: I’ll be able to tell the machine to linger over a specific spot in future iterations, too.
Tristina Damico, a licensed massage therapist and spa director for Arch Amenities Group—which manages 80 spa locations in the US including the ones at the Lotte New York Palace, 1 Hotel Brooklyn Bridge and the Baccarat hotel—says Aescape was a no-brainer for the Palace’s spa.
“The Lotte Palace Hotel has 900-plus rooms, right?” she tells Bloomberg. “They do a lot of conferences. Business travelers are there all week, all the time. And their schedules are packed. They have very little time for a proper spa experience.” The same is true for locals with offices in Midtown East, who wouldn’t think about the Palace spa as an obvious place to spend a lunch break.
“What’s nice about Aescape is you can do it in half hour. And there’s no oil or cream use, so you don’t have to shower or wash your hair. You can just put your clothes on and go back to work,” she says. In my experience, the disposable covers for the face rest left a crease on my forehead for hours, but when I tell her this, Damico suggests the spa might replace them with softer cloth covers.
A robot, of course, can’t replace that feeling of another human genuinely considering your needs. It also won’t ask you what kind of aromas you enjoy or offer a foot soaking ritual before your treatment. But that’s not the point.
Litman sees the service as a convenience: Practical more than pampering. It’s a way to maintain a wellness routine and ensure consistency no matter where you are.
And crucially, it can help hotels overcome a problem of supply and demand. “We are providing a service for a category that has some very real labor issues,” he says, citing industry research conducted as recently as this summer. “Fewer people are graduating from massage schools, and more people want wellness services. Automation is just going to become the solution.”
He adds that Aespace gives boutique and smaller properties the ability to convert an underutilized space into a makeshift spa, without requiring additional staff; and they could book massages at all hours. “It’s only around $250 a day to operate our tables,” he adds. “That means, depending upon the environment, it’s a few massages a day to just break even and everything else is margin on top of that.”
To me, the robo-masseur seems ripe for hotels with space to spare—as well as airport lounges, which have been doubling down on wellness amenities for years but rarely include even a standard massage chair. The setup works especially well for body-conscious or otherwise modest travelers, who may feel uncomfortable with a human therapist.
I would happily use these robots again if I encounter them along my travels; the benefits are clear, and the pricing, which will start at $60 for 30 minutes at other locations (there are two so far, bookable via the Aescape app), is much more affordable than human services. A 30-minute back and shoulder rub by a human at the Palace hotel costs double the Aescape price; at other luxury hotels you’ll easily spend $250 for an hour.
One thing did make the robot a bit lifelike: Its hands were warm. Still, when the receptionist asked me after my treatment if I’d perhaps fallen asleep, my answer was absolutely not. Playing with the screen’s controls was too novel and fun for me to properly relax. “Maybe next time,” I told her.
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