They have arrived! What has arrived you ask? RULES! Rules have arrived… In all seriousness very strict cleanliness and disinfection parameters are needed to be able to effectively provide safe and sanitized spaces to our very eager to travel guests. But, yeah! Would rules from governing bodies who have not been able to handle three major emergencies in a span of three years be effective or rather outside of the business teams common sense? I think not.

The STR community here in Puerto Rico sat through an almost two hour long webinar to wait for it… “Discuss the new parameters on how to handle this pandemic scenario and what will be expected from an STR by the governing body”. There’s a pretty clear underlying situation in regards to this that screams out say it SAY IT to me and that is oversight. Puerto Rico’s government has a notorious reputation of not running effective oversight on programs and regulations they stipulate and this coupled with the amount of active STRs in Puerto Rico seems like another moment when they will fail at this once more.

Now I’m not saying that some of the regulations aren’t sound and make sense. Heck! They came out of the CDC’s own disinfection protocol and some out of Airbnb’s recommended protocols, maybe it’s better to say they copy and pasted. There’s nothing wrong with copy and pasting. Why reinvent the wheel? Of course they make sense, they were made for the specific purpose of combating this disease. My actual problem with the webinar was that the part of actually discussing disinfection protocols was kept to a minimum and the webinar was hijacked by the office that oversees STR registry and taxes. We spent more than 50% of the webinar listening to the person heading the office that STRs needed to be registered and have to report on occupancy taxes which I completely agree, but, don’t use a webinar that is supposed to discuss a sensitive and very important topic to talk taxes. This could have been a whole other webinar and you would have had so many questions all over the place making you lose track of the webinar progression.

There are some things that enter into the realm of wait what how? For example:

A guest is required by the tourism company to fill out a declaration of contact and travel upon checking in to a unit. I can’t begin to say why this is a close to impossible feat for hosts particularly to accomplish.
- First off the guest must be willing to comply, which may come as a surprise to our tourism company a lot of guests do not follow house rules let alone will they file a government mandated form (I could be underestimating our guests but, we’ll see). The tourism company also expected to add a time limit of two hours after check in to have the form completed, yeah great move.
- Second, actually having them complete the form and receive poses a logistical problem.
  - On one side you can collect it at the end of the reservation (But, that will likely mean it will never get filled out)
  - Or you can personally provide it and collect it at the time it’s filled. This means person to person interaction and an unnecessary risk and privacy invasion on your guest. Additionally that they are advocating for self check ins to be the norm which leaves us with the first scenario.
How would’ve I done it? Well using the same online platform that the tourism company has for collecting taxes and issuing hospitality registrations they could have created an in app link that would provide the form electronically to the pass it on to the guest. No interaction, no paper, no exchange, better process tracking and better storage for future reference.
24 hours between check out and new check ins
- This is somewhat difficult especially for people using advanced PMSs that prioritize maximizing the number of bookings and takes away the ability to establish preparation time (a period between a check out and a check in)
- Also, it severely affects the NOI of the listings even when we do know methods of containment and highly effective disinfection.
Guests need to have a written guide of the safety and disinfection protocols
- Additional to the inefficiencies of paper, its raises costs, it needs to be physically distributed and does not provide an intuitive way to portray the info.
I would just have required a digital guidebook that people can access anytime anywhere without having to rely on paper. A permanent sign or a video can complement this solution.
Auto certification
- Operators need to auto certify themselves to ensure that they understand and are following the procedures. This is a very good measure and the fact that the operators get a badge signifying that they are complying provides a sense of important comfort to the guest that is very much needed.
A stand up letter signaling who was the last to enter and inspect the unit
- It’s a whatever measure, operators should have the option to opt out of this since it’s really not up to the governing body to decide how they process their guest’s experience.
- This should be a suggestion (a suggestion we would have taken since it’s a good idea).