If you’ve ever sailed aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise, a song lurks deep within your subconscious: a kiddie-style earworm about washing your hands that loops endlessly in the buffet entrance and on in-room TVs.
“Wash your hands, like 50 times a day,” the tune goes, imploring passengers—with a cartoon octopus cleaning its multitude of hands — to do what it takes to avoid a norovirus outbreak, or worse. It’s far from the ambient music of a five-star hotel, whose in-room TVs are more likely to feature swells of orchestral strings. But it’s what’s necessary to keep 6,000-plus passengers from inadvertently fueling a public health fire.
“There’s quite a lot of condescension in the (travel) industry about cruises,” says Bjorn Hanson, a veteran hospitality researcher and consultant. “In fact, most hotels would say they use the anti-cruise model of hospitality.”
Perhaps for the first time, though, hotels and resorts on dry land have to fight microbial infestations with the persistence of a tired cruise director. It’s no surprise that as these properties start to reopen following months of COVID-19-related lockdowns, they’re turning to that cruise model for ideas on how to keep guests safe.
One company leaning into the cruise philosophy is HotelAVE, a hospitality asset-management and advisory firm that counts more than 1,000 properties as clients — including outposts of such big brands as Four Seasons, St. Regis, Fairmont and JW Marriott. Says Chief Executive Officer Michelle Russo: “Our clients were only focused on advancing cleaning procedures and not new operational initiatives,” which means they were cleaning up messes, rather than preventing them in the first place.
Her short list of cruise like initiatives helps shift ingrained consumer behaviors. It includes scheduling all meal times (including breakfast), pre-reserving pool chairs and gym sessions, creating elaborate grab-and-go dining, streamlining luggage handling services, and shifting to an all-inclusive pricing model that even bakes tips into the upfront rate. That means no crowd at the host stand for breakfast, no bellboy accompanying you to your room, and no cash exchanges.
