Quarantine hotel mess must be sorted out
I read your June 28 editorial on the quarantine hotel fiasco (“Cheats must be given no room to prosper”) with interest.
It is indeed a complete mess. The government has relied on normal commercial practice in allowing travellers to book rooms, but as any good economist knows, the market fails when there is a monopoly and far greater demand than supply.
In which case you get exactly what we have now: prices rising (due to both hotels taking advantage of their monopoly and scalpers “helping” supply to meet demand) and quality falling.
Anyone booking a room at the moment is faced with policies which require upfront payment with zero flexibility (some will not give a refund even if you do not stay at all due to testing positive on arrival!) – if they can find one at all.
I am travelling for business and finally managed to get a room in August at a massive cost for a low-quality hotel because I must be in Hong Kong to apply for the Japanese visa I need two weeks later – Hong Kong is not alone in making travel difficult for business travellers.
But there is an obvious solution, other than home quarantine.
That would be to appoint a single, large, reputable travel agent to manage all the bookings. Make hotel rooms available for booking in one place, limited to a single booking per ID number to prevent scalping.
This would enable the true situation to become much clearer and travellers would have only one point of contact, who would be paid for their services, and required to meet performance targets like email and phone response times.
While the best solution is removing quarantine altogether like the rest of the world, or at least allowing home quarantine, if we are to continue this nightmare much longer, the government really needs to sort the system out.
Sarah Fairhurst, Tuen Mun