Competition unveils strategy

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AFAR is a good travel site that started small and did sell out to the big$$ quite a while ago, but if you want to know what the big guns are doing against Covid read on…
Personally, I just don’t buy into this level of fear and paranoia, but if you are interested: afar.com
Four Seasons partnered with Johns Hopkins. Hilton linked up with the Mayo Clinic. Hotels worldwide are introducing enhanced sanitization and social-distancing measures to reassure travelers that their stay in the age of COVID-19 will be safe.

As coronavirus lockdown measures begin to ease at home and many of us are starting to dream about where we will travel to first and where we will stay when we do. And the first question that usually comes to mind soon thereafter is: But will it be safe?

Hotels and resorts are hoping to answer that question with a resounding “yes” by instituting new health, safety, and cleanliness protocols intended to assure travelers concerned about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that they’re taking infection prevention seriously.

This week, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts announced a new partnership with Johns Hopkins Medicine International to develop an enhanced health and safety program at its global portfolio of luxury properties. An important aspect of the program is that international health-care experts will check to make sure that properties are properly executing the enhanced procedures. They include measures such as daily room disinfections with EPA-approved products; hourly cleaning of public areas; amenity kits in each room that include face masks, hand sanitizer, and sanitization wipes; and social-distancing measures like spaced-out fitness equipment and contactless check-in.

![Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts hopes to encourage guest and staff communication to continue through its Four Seasons Chat app.
Four Seasons employees are also being trained in health and sanitation procedures that will protect them and guests, as well as in how to provide empathetic, personalized care and ensure that connection is not lost despite limited face-to-face interaction. (For instance, the hotel group has a three-year-old app called Four Seasons Chat that guests can use to reach out to employees for assistance.)

The Four Seasons’ approach is the latest in a string of enhanced health and safety policies from hotels. In April, in the age of COVID-19, which includes touchless check-in and the use of hospital-grade disinfectant to sanitize surfaces throughout its hotels. The plan was developed by a task force that includes infectious disease experts and public health and food safety scientists.

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I expect that most hosts either have a cleaning service or clean quite thoroughly themselves. Several have mentioned getting rid of items that are not washed each time like throw pillows. The addition of small personal amenity kits with masks etc. might be a nice touch for hosts. We already post our cleaning commitment in each room and will rewrite it to emphasize what we do.

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I think that this might have been a dodgy PR move - it’s saying (to me anyway) “our cleaning standards were rubbish before but we’ve improved them”. :rofl:

Why say how old their app is?

It’s a strange one…

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We all know that hotels’ standards were rubbish before. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stayed in hotels that weren’t cleaned properly - hairs on the shower walls, dirty “sanitized” glasses, floors not vacuumed.

Many of us hosts here already clean to standards that would make a hospital operating theater look messy. Earning “sparkling clean” comments isn’t easy as an Air host - people are actively looking under the bed for dust bunnies!

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I have to say we recently stayed in a hotel. A nice place. But their idea of “enhanced cleaning” was to use tons of bleach EVERYWHERE! It was so bad in the elevator and bathrooms I wanted to gag. I actually have some chemical sensitivities. Thankfully we brought our own pillows as the bed sheets and blanket had obviously been SOAKED in bleach. I wish I had brought my own blanket as I would have slept with that instead of the blankets on the bed. We had to wash our pillow cases when we got home as the smell of bleach had soaked in so strongly from 1 NIGHT in the hotel.