My 10 days living in a quarantine hotel at Heathrow
Reporter Reem Ahmed and her sister paid £2,600 for 10 days in a room, were allowed 20 minutes of exercise a day in a car park and fed aeroplane-style meals three times a day...
OVER the last year, self-isolation has become a norm in society – not only in Wales but across the globe. If you developed a new, continuous cough, came into contact with someone who has Covid, or even caught the virus yourself, chances are you’ve had to stay cooped up at home for 10 days and keep a distance from your loved ones.
But few of us have experienced a much more restrictive form of self-quarantine that has arisen in response to the pandemic – a quarantine hotel.
Quarantine hotels were introduced by the UK Government on February 15 as a means to prevent the spread of the virus and its variants from countries and territories where travel to the UK is banned.
These are known as “red list” locations and a list of them can be found on the government website. You can only travel to the UK from these countries if you’re a British national, an Irish national, or anyone with residence rights in the UK
By law, travellers to the UK who have visited or passed through any of these areas in the 10 days before their arrival are required to complete a full 10-day quarantine at a government-approved hotel.
The day you arrive counts as day 0, and you are allowed to leave from midnight of the 11th day.
The stay will set you back a hefty £1,750 for one adult, with a rate of £650 for each additional adult in the same room, and £325 for one child.
From Saturday, April 17, until Wednesday, April 28, this year, after travelling from Dubai, I stayed with my sister in one of these hotels, the Courtyard by Marriott, right next to London Heathrow Airport.
This is what it was like from an insider’s perspective.
How did we book the hotel?
Our quarantine hotel experience actually began well before we arrived – and not in a good way.
All quarantine hotel bookings are managed by Corporate Travel Management (CTM), which brands itself as an “award-winning travel management company”. You must book your stay through their portal, and you have no choice which government-approved hotel you stay in.
Booking the hotel itself was stressful. We’d left the booking until the day before our flight, because we were yet to receive our negative Covid test result (taken no earlier than 72 hours before travel, a mandatory requirement for entering the UK).
Because our flight was a connecting flight via Germany, which required the Covid test to be taken no earlier than 48 hours before travelling, this shortened our window even further.
However, if we cancelled or amended our booking later than 48 hours before arrival at the hotel, CTM said they would apply a penalty charge of £200, on top of the £2,400 we’d already forked out.
So, we had no choice but to book the hotel after we received our negative Covid result. But eventually when we tried to book, the CTM website had glitched, meaning that we couldn’t book our stay in a hotel.
Our desperate emails and phone calls to the CTM helpline went unanswered – and to this day I haven’t received a reply. We were left floundering, unsure whether to cancel our flight with so little time. We were far from the only ones who had had no help from CTM, which has been exclusively hired by the UK Government to manage the quarantine hotels.
Hundreds of tweets from desperate and angry travellers to the company since the hotels were introduced testify to this. Countless people have had problems booking their hotels and Covid test kits – with deafening silence from the company when they have tried to contact them.
As a last resort, we DM’d CTM on Twitter and thankfully received a response that informed us the glitch on the website was now sorted.
And so we booked our hotel, not realising that this preliminary negative experience would set the tone for our 10-day stay.
How did we get to the hotel?
When we arrived at Heathrow Airport after travelling for just over 16 hours, we were directed by signs to a long queue for travellers from red list countries.
Passing through the UK border went smoothly enough, but it was after this that we really began to understand that we were to be treated like high-risk criminals.
Once we got through border force, our passports were given to an airport staff member, who escorted us to a queue of people waiting to be taken to a quarantine hotel. He stood with us the entire time in the queue, still holding onto our passports.
Each traveller had their own personal guardian in the exact same way – presumably because they expected us to run off.
After providing details of the hotel we were staying in, we were escorted to a waiting room with other quarantine hotel guests.
Then we had to walk in single file throughout the airport to a coach that was waiting for us, all the while surrounded by lots of security men.
We filed into the coach, which took us to the various hotels, dropping people off at each one. When we finally arrived at the Courtyard by Marriott, we were greeted by a swarm of 15 to 20 security guards at the entrance and in the lobby, which felt very unnecessary. Instead of checking into the hotel like normal, we were directed to another waiting room near the entrance with other guests, and had to fill out forms with our details.
Then, armed with an information booklet about what to expect from our stay and the hotel, as well as two new bottles of hand sanitiser, we were escorted to our room to finally begin our quarantine.
What was the room like?
The hotel room itself was a standard twin size, with two beds, a flat screen TV and a wardrobe. Basic supplies for tea and coffee were already in the room and you could request top-ups from reception.
There were also basic toiletries in the bathroom, which you could also ask to be topped up.
Noticeably, there was no reusable crockery or cutlery in the hotel room whatsoever, which you usually would get. But there was a kettle, ironing board and hairdryer.
We were told that bedsheets and towels would be
replaced every three days. Even though there were two of us in the room, there was only one chair, or rather “one and a half” as my sister put it – a chair with a foot stool.
There was a tiny desk, and an even tinier table, which was not big enough for both of us to eat our meals at the same time.
How did we get food?
Though you could order in food from outside which security would deliver to your door, the hotel provided three meals a day, which we ordered a couple of days in advance.
We had to fill out forms with meal choices and leave them outside our door for the kitchen staff to pick up. There were meat and vegetarian options for each meal.
Breakfast was always a choice between a full English breakfast, a vegetarian English breakfast, or a continental breakfast.
Lunch and dinner was different every day, but apart from a Cumberland sausage in the full English breakfast, no meat other than chicken was ever on the menu.
The reason for this was unclear, but possibly the hotel anticipated an influx of travellers who would not eat pork, beef or seafood for religious reasons.
The food would be delivered directly to our door and we had to wait 10 seconds before opening it to pick it up.
Overall, aside from the lack of variety and some small portion sizes, it wasn’t necessarily the quality of the food which was poor, but rather the service.
We often didn’t get dessert with our lunch, or a completely different meal from the one that was on the menu would arrive at our door without any explanation.
One time we ordered Thai chicken curry, but were given boiled chicken and mash potato instead.
In the first week, our dinner arrived very late several times (twice as late as 10.55pm), even though we’d made several phone calls for hours to reception to ask for the missing food. As with our calls to CTM before, our calls went unheeded.
It also struck me as ironic that Boris Johnson urged leaders at the Leaders Summit on Climate last month to “make this decade the moment of decisive change in the fight against climate change”, but under his very nose the quarantine hotels approved by his government are producing massive amounts of waste.
Almost every single meal we received came in a non-recyclable polystyrene takeaway box, and we were also inundated with plastic cutlery, coffee cups and water bottles.
It would have been more logical and environmentally friendly to provide guests with metal cutlery, mugs and glasses which we could have kept for the whole stay, reused and washed ourselves.
The fact this has been ill-thought-out became clear when we received cereal and milk for breakfast, but no bowl.
After asking if we could have one, we were told there were no bowls available, and instead were given yet another polystyrene takeaway box to use along with a plastic spoon
What were we allowed and not allowed to do?
We were not allowed to leave our rooms under any circumstances apart from going for a short walk of a maximum of 20 minutes outside.
Should anyone have tried to leave their room without permission, they would have been confronted with security guards who occupy every floor. Whenever you wanted to go for a walk, you had to phone security directly to arrange a time.
They would come directly to your room to escort you all the way to the exit to the small car park, which is the only place outside we could walk.
At the exit we had to provide our details – name, room number – and the times we left and returned were noted down to the minute.
I’m not sure how they expected people to run away, seeing as the car park itself was full of security guards who stood at every corner. It is also unclear what would have happened if you stayed outside beyond the allotted 20-minute time frame.
The security guards, who had to sit for hours outside, were friendly and chatted to guests from a distance.
It was telling that one of them told us he believed it was all a money-grabbing scheme by the Government.
When we weren’t having our short walk, the room itself had a flat-screen TV on the wall with a variety of channels for us to watch.
There was also WiFi, although for the first few days it wasn’t working properly, which was difficult for my sister who was studying for exams.
On day two and day eight, we were required to take Covid tests. The fact it was mandatory to stay a further two days after the day eight test was another aspect of our stay that I thought had been ill-thought-out.
Even though we got our final negative test result early on day nine from the NHS, we still couldn’t leave until midnight of the 11th day, which felt like an unnecessary waste of time.
How did we leave?
We couldn’t leave without consulting security first to arrange a specific time on the 11th day.
Till the very moment we left, we had to be escorted by security guards to the exit, before filling out yet another form about our stay.
We had to arrange our own transport to leave the hotel, which felt like a final kick in the teeth because we’d been told when we booked that we would have transport back to the airport.
It felt very freeing to finally leave the hotel and step into the taxi.
I felt a bit like the character in a dystopian film who survives and drives off into the sunset.