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Hotel corporations have been selling new cleaning projects for months to regain the acceptance of travelers. But visitors to some hotels in the United States say they are not keeping their promises.
By Jane L. Levere
In June, Charles Kunz stayed at Atlanta’s Westin Airport and discovered “the biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen” in his bed the next morning. Durham, North Carolina attorney, a Titanium member of Marriott’s Bonvoy Loyalty Program, said the bug “was the length of my little finger. Me in the south and I’m no stranger to insects.”
In July, Jeff Coons and his wife spent 3 nights at the Sheraton Panama City Beach Golf and Spa Resort in Florida. The airline’s product progression manager based in Smyrna, Georgia and a Member of Bonvoy Lifetime Platinum discovered that the use of the mask is “apparently optional” among hotel staff, and that only one hand sanitizer dispenser can be found anywhere. The toilet seat seal in his bathroom was damaged and there was an oversized Lego block under a guest room chair.
Major hotel corporations have been selling new cleaning projects since spring to regain the trust of the traveling public in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. But some hotel visitors in the U.S., adding their most valuable customers, loyalty program members, say they are keeping their promises.
Referring to the reports described through Coons and Kunz, a Marriott spokesman, whose brands come with Sheraton and Westin, he said the company “has a long-standing reputation for the best hotel cleaning criteria.” Spokesman John Wolf said these criteria had been advanced several times since the start of the pandemic, adding that on the “rare” occasion of a hotel fulfilling them, Marriott is running to “strengthen them.”
Other travelers, after staying at independent chains and hotels across the country, have visited TripAdvisor, Facebook and forums like FlyerTalk to report their discontent with applying cleaning standards and mask use. The chain’s hotels have won court cases with Embassy Suites through Hilton Myrtle Beach Oceanfront Resort in South Carolina and Gaylord Opryland Resort – Marriott Convention Center in Nashville. Recently hosted on TripAdvisor are Boar’s Head Resort in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Hawks Cay Resort in Duck Key, Florida.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this has become the concentrate of a coronavirus outbreak,” a TripAdvisor commentator wrote after expressing his thoughts on cleaning Boar’s Head’s usual hotel rooms and spaces. (The general manager responded on the site in writing: “I can assure you that the delight you have had and witnessed is not standard, nor is it ok, especially now. I can assure you and others that our facility and our facilities have protocols for the protection of our customers.
Cleaning factor aside, the pandemic has wraged all sectors of the industry. According to a report released last week through the U.S.S Travel Association, an industry group, the pandemic, since early March, has resulted in cumulative losses of more than $341 billion for U.S. industry. In a forecast published this month, STR, a hosting studio firm, and Tourism Economics, a forecast and analysis firm, predicted that “the full recovery in room and hotel call revenue in the United States remains unlikely until 2023 and 2024, respectively. “
But cleanliness, or lack thereof, is the most important thing for prospective travelers, according to a study published today through the American Association of Hotels and Accommodation. Surveying about 700 travelers who spent five or more nights in a hotel in 2019, the study aimed to highlight the emotions of ordinary travelers about cleaning standards.
When presented with 8 things that could be just your next hotel stay, the highest percentage of respondents (34%) said cleanliness was the main thing when opting for a hotel. Other things included security, value and location.
Henry Harteveldt, founder of Atmosphere Research Group, a San Francisco-based market research company, also surveyed 2,500 entrepreneurs and recreation companies in the United States last month. Three-quarters of respondents said they were some or very involved with covid-19 capture. Of the approximately 1,060 respondents who had stayed at least once in a hotel last year, more than 80% said it was vital that hotels exceeded room cleaning rules issued by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The C.D.C. the regulations include, among other measures, the common use of disinfectants approved by the E.P.A. on “surfaces and elements affected by several people”, as well as the practice of social estrangement and mask disguise.
If hotel owners do not meet cleaning standards, Harteveldt said, “customers would possibly be afraid of what may also go wrong. This may also be just your willingness to return to the hotel and your loyalty to the lopass to the hotel group.”
Although hotel companies, along with Marriott and others, have instituted these new cleaning standards, in many cases they own or operate with branded hotels. According to STR, 61% of the 56,300 hotels in the United States are branded today, while 39% are independent. Most branded hotels are independently owned and operate through third parties, who are guilty of maintaining the cleanliness standards of a brand.
“Just because you enter a hotel with a logo call doesn’t mean the logo is involved in controlling that establishment,” Harteveldt said.
Unsurprisingly, cleaning issues also affect some of the hotel’s housekeepers.
Lydia Hernandez, who has worked as a housekeeper for 15 years at Hilton Philadelphia in Penn’s Landing, is a member of Unite Here, a hotel staff union in Canada and the United States. When the pandemic began, it was only executed one day a week; most recently, he worked five days a week, 8.5 hours a day. Hernandez said that lately the hotel has between eight and ten full-time housewives; before the pandemic, he said there were 35.
His biggest fear now is the number of rooms he has to leave blank on a daily basis. Before the pandemic, he cleaned all the rooms blank every day, a procedure he said took an hour according to the room. Now he only leaves a room blank when he leaves and has to meet Hilton’s new unexpressed standards. These come with a deep plugging of 10 highly tactile areas, ordering the pa according to the appliance and striking a seal on the bedroom door to imply that it has not been entered since it was cleaned blank.
Many of today’s guests, he says, are “more messy.” They leave the rooms to the point where it’s a disaster. They drink, they eat chips, they throw them on the floor, in the bathroom, in the bathtub. It’s bad.”
You cannot complete the emptying of the 14 rooms assigned to you daily due to the time it takes each one. It usually takes 40 to 60 minutes blank a room today, more than an hour if it is dirty.
Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing is controlled by Pyramid Hotel Group and is owned by local developer Daniel J. Keating, III. Alan Cagle, the general manager, described the hotel’s commitment to protecting team members and visitors as “incomparable” and noted that the hotel “maintained an open line of communication with keywives regarding their workload during the pandemic.” He also stated that the hotel’s popular practice of cleaning rooms only when a guest makes check-out limit “exposure and potential dangers to our essential employees.”
Daily room cleaning the norm before the pandemic; For reasons of sustainability and cost-cutting, some brands have allowed consumers to opt out. Who. Lately he has recommended postponing these opt-out programs, a move taken by some hotel corporations in the wake of the pandemic.
The frequency of room cleaning is a topic of much debate in the industry: last month, the San Francisco City Supervisory Board passed an ordinance on “healthy buildings” that requires cleaning hotel rooms. Local hotel teams and AHLA continue to say that the order would “create difficulties for an industry that is already suffering.”
In the new AHLA study, nearly 90% of respondents said restricting the family in the room to “on request only” would increase their comfort level, and nearly 60% didn’t need a family.
If hotel owners forget the new cleaning standards, Harteveldt warned that he may come back to hang out in the social media era.
“People can percentages and percentages of all facets of the journey. Posting pictures of clean rooms dirty or poorly cleaned that others see, with the threat of photographs becoming viral, will create a much greater challenge for the hotel owner and lopass in the long run than the correct cleaning fee for the rooms, I was told.
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