I know this hotel. Before Covid it had 24-hour room service, several restaurants, a nice pool, etc. Pretty nice place.
Now, it’s a quarantine hotel, Hong Kong being the only place in the world other than the mainland and Ukraine to still require quarantine by all arriving passengers.
As a quarantine hotel, it’s full, it accepts only pre-payment, at full room price, with no cancellation possible, there’s no room service, no restaurants open, no swimming allowed. They won’t even supply beer or wine, you have to get your significant others to deliver to the front desk.
And this is what your standard meal looks like:
 |
| Scraps on a plastic plate. I don’t even know what some of this is |
So: less service than before, they’re paying for fewer staff, provide no room service, rooms are full-price and non-refundable. That’s what you call profiteering. Shame on our Hong Kong government for still requiring quarantine and shame on them for allowing such gross profiteering.
ADDED: This pandemic again confounds. At the outbreak I thought, boy this is going to hammer our hotel industry. In fact, they’re doing the opposite. Coining it, hand over fist. by offering themselves up to quarantine guests.
Jing note:
A travel note:
After being grounded for more than a year [PF: more like 2.5 years] due to Covid, traveling again can be an exciting but also exhausting experience. Timed a couple of weeks before the European summer holiday season, my trip went relatively smoother than traveling in all the heat waves right now..
When preparing for the trip, I was almost lost in the ocean of online information about travel restrictions, however, the reality is simpler, life in Europe seems almost normal, except a Ukrainian flag or two on the balcony or bar window, a few masked travelers walking through the arrivals hall reminding us of the war and the virus still out there, but flight cancellations and frequent strikes bring me back to an uncertain future……
