• Rakuten STAY villas and apartments will be fully unmanned – no humans necessary,   

Excerpt from PhocusWire

Alibaba has its future hotel, FlyZoo, launched in Hangzhou inn 2018. Tencent launched an AI smart room at the Atour S Hotel in Beijing. There was a time when Amazon sounded out the idea of Amazon-operated hotels.

Where these projects are right now is unclear, but Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant, is making ambitious moves to building out Rakuten STAY, a vacation rentals model in which it will own, manage and operate its inventory not just in Japan but worldwide – and its accommodation will be fully powered by services within the Rakuten eco-system.

According to Munekatsu Ota, CEO of Rakuten STAY and an online travel and vacation rental veteran who’s spent much of his career with Rakuten, 90% of operating costs regarding the Rakuten STAY accommodations are already powered by Rakuten services.

“Inside the accommodation, we have e-commerce services where people can buy immediately via QR code. There’s Rakuten Music, Books, etc. Only water and gas are out of the Rakuten eco-system and with Rakuten working on energy – solar power and gas – soon, it will only be water that’s not provided by Rakuten,” laughed Ota.

The idea too is that these Rakuten STAY villas and apartments will be fully unmanned – no humans necessary, said Ota.

“This is a model only Rakuten can do,” said Ota, who said he’s studied various models including OYO and who is now based in Singapore to head the global expansion of the new business.

Rakuten STAY was previously called Rakuten LIFULL STAY, a vacation rental marketplace it operated in partnership with LIFULL. Last year, it acquired LIFULL’s 49% stake and rebranded it Rakuten STAY to create a new real estate model to own and operate its own brand of “wide spaces,” be it private villas or apartments, on top of the marketplace that has 100,000 Vacation STAY listings.

“We wanted to create a new real estate model, because we believe Rakuten STAY can be a bigger business than Vacation STAY in the long term,” said Ota.

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