In today’s Covid-19 stricken world, safety seals are becoming now the main tool to assure potential hotels, hostels and resorts bookers – their selection of a specific place is indeed right, and they could feel relatively safe through their stay. Concerns and case studies from this past 2020 summer provide strong testimonials that these seals are oftentimes not that credible and were awarded too easily because they do not follow a professional and meticulous verification or audit step phase approach.
The EBI Group experts have identified just some key concerns as follows:
- Some individual establishments in “red” countries have been awarded international sanitary clearances, whereas the general national situation does not justify any awarding. A situation that could become highly misleading and harmful to potential visitors.
- Unlike ISO standards certifications, for example, where a clear professional echelon dictates clear “rules of the game” to get successfully certified, and clear conditions are attached to the certification, the anti-COVID-19 sanitary seals do not have clear, detailed rules for obtaining and keeping the certification. It might be the case that these will come over the coming months (or not), as the awarding process appears to have been done quite hastily and under strong pressure to open very quickly.
- Much more credibility (of the sanitary seal) might be achieved as travel and hospitality establishments will occasionally fail to obtain the seal. Only those really committed and proving outstanding cleanliness and sanitary measures over time will ultimately receive it.
- Sanitary labels are essentially newly described protocols to tackle and prevent Covid-19 spread. They are quite generic, and therefore a particular conversion phase is needed, in our opinion, to adapt them individually for each hotel, hostel, resort chain, or other establishment seeking this certification. We have not identified such a developed conversion phase yet. Furthermore, we can often see that “corners are sometimes being cut” not to deter guests from placing a booking.
- Lastly, the sanitary and anti-COVID-19 labels tend to concentrate on mainly the highly visible “front end operations” and could neglect the less visible (to the guest) back end issues. It is natural that investing in physical partitions, encapsulations, hand sanitation stations, etc. would preside over to assure the concerned guests quickly, but what about preventive maintenance and re-configuration of operations to suit the new post-COVID-19 world? Issues the guests cannot identify fast or at all but are essential to allow their long-lasting well-being.
EBI Consulting Group believes in laying profound and solid foundations for these sanitary anti-COVID-19 seals to be effective in the longer run. Coming from the world of Quality Assurance, we know that without having clear Standards of Operations, professional work instructions, and a solid verification (audit) tools – COVID 19 infections and contaminations might ultimately repeat in any establishment, foregoing all efforts invested in preventing them.
