Starting to receive guests 🛬 in pandemic times 👑🦠

Guests have begome to comeback to Puerto Rico for semi-leisure travel. I say semi-leisure because currently theirs a pretty irrational curfew law still in effect and other bogus restrictions that we won’t get into in this post because we would not be able to make this a quick read. We’ll be discussing our procedures and how guests are going about the whole situation.

Our governing bodies making sense of their decisions

Reasons for traveling

We’ve had a pretty common trend coming up in our guest messages. It has always been present to some degree in our portfolio and market but, it seems to be more prevalent or at least within the reservations we’re receiving, it seems that more people are coming to visit family particularly elderly members. That’s the reason for the semi-leisure travel there’s a specific reason to make the journey and to also have some fun.

The first couple of guests

Oddly enough the guests that we’ve had the pleasure of receiving have been very…… um…… different in a very good way. They have been unusually responsive, going the extra mile to try to help our cleanliness efforts and actually following our relatively lax house rules. I mean different since the last few years (before hostpitality) we’ve just been Airbnb hosts and we experienced first hand the progression of guests from people that were very conscious of following house rules to people that were expecting hotel style accommodation in our units or they knew about Airbnb’s guest first mentality and proceeded to take advantage of it.

But, now it’s been different we’ve encountered the guests that we had used to encounter three or four years ago. It seems surreal, but, it could just be a function of the current situation. People are just starting to head out again and maybe their extra careful meaning that they are abiding by the dictates of wherever they are.

Maybe it’s that the guests that still hold that initial value are the ones traveling…

Our process

I wanted to offer guests peace of mind when choosing a place to stay this is the reason I went back to the drawing board and re imagined our cleaning process. This is when the decision was made to scrap it and start over, not the wisest thing but, I wanted to build out a factory meaning a process that could be scaled up and not have the priors hindrances (I didn’t really scrape all of it, there was still valuable info there).

I started by trying to put myself in the shoes of my cleaning staff and the guests. The cleaning staff wants to be as isolated as possible from any risky situation and the guest wants a clean place with as low human interaction as possible. So naturally I got that cleaning staff needs preventative and disinfecting equipment and the guests would retain our regular self check in and would now have disinfecting stations, supplies and the state mandatory prevention equipment in the units. These factors were my guiding principles for our new protocol, one which our staff is being trained for and our guests will notice our care.

Going forward

It’s probably going to be an interesting rest of the year to say the least and we’ll more than likely be put to the test numerous times. I can only say for you guys to stay strong and keep a problem solving mindset, I hope I see you on the other side.

-GIan from Hostpitality