Customers staying at one of Travelodge's seven Newcastle hotels can rest assured the housdekeeping is taken care of - thanks to a clean team that has just trundled into town.
The budget hotel chain has taken delivery of 7,500 robot vacuum cleaners to help the housekeeping teams in its 579 hotels in the UK, including more than 20 in the North East.
Cleaners at the chain are faced with nearly 44,000 rooms to clean every day, so their new robot buddies are very welcome additions to the team, who collectively vacuum the distance from Newcastle to New York every day.
Go here for the very latest live traffic and travel news and North East updates
Although robot hoovers are widely available for homes, Travelodge had to travel into the to create an industrial hotel spec version which has robust features to enable it to withstand the daily heavy duty requirements of working in a busy hotel.
It hasn't all been plain sailing - there have been a couple of casualties during training.
A RoboVac Buddy at Gatwick Airport Travelodge took a wrong turn and was found in Spain.
Another RoboVac Buddy at Cambridge Orchard Park Travelodge had a technical glitch during its reception cleaning shift and bolted out of the hotel onto the streets. It was later founded grounded in a nearby bush.
The hotel chain teamed up with a Sheffield based company that specialises in manufacturing specialist cleaning equipment to engineer the UK’s first industrial RoboVac Buddy, which has features such as an industrial booster battery and a larger dust collector to minimise charging and emptying between shifts.
