Hotel

All of the hotels are rushing to meet the deadline of October 15th, when the floodgates of tourism swing wide open. Everyone is excited ... well, not every one.

The “new normal” hotel experience could be a shocker for tourists. A couple of excerpts from an interesting article by Chris Matyszczyk on the ZDNet site can provide some background. The entire article a good read. While the anecdotal account is not set in Hawai’i, the experience detailed will soon be quite similar:

The last time we'd stayed at this place, the staff was positively chirping, offering a glass of champagne on entry. Just because.

This time, an echo. We checked in with a staff member who did his very best to be cheerful. But it's hard to do that when everyone's wearing a mask.

Masks make it hard to see expressions. They can even make it hard to hear what someone else is saying. And then there's the piece of glass separating you from the employees.

Then, there’s the room:

A feeling of freshness is something you always hope for on entering a hotel room for the first time. Here, though, the usual freshness was replaced by a curious smell. Not exactly of detergent, but of a product that hadn't originally been intended for hotels.

That pungent odor, of course, is commercial disinfectant. It smells more like insecticide, which is basically what it is.

The entire experience is likely to be the same in Hawai’i as most hotel chains have standardized “super-duper corona” protocols. Then, there will be the mandatory face masks and “social distancing,” unlikely to be popular when the tourist density increases (as predicted previously in Notes). Frankly, the expectation is for a full-on “clusterfuck.”

Miscellany: The ebooks, “Hello World” by Hannah Fry, and, “Falter” by Bill McKibben, have been read to completion. The gender “political correctness” is still tiresome, though.