Managing Britain’s hotel quarantine hasn’t been easy or pleasant for Corporate Travel Management, but it has helped weather the pandemic storm.
| November 26 was a dramatic day in the travel and tourism sector. The British government, spooked by the sudden emergence of the new COVID-19 variant now known as omicron, resurrected 10-day hotel quarantine for arrivals for half a dozen African countries.
They weren’t the only ones to suffer. People on holiday or visiting family in South Africa suddenly discovered they were up for £2285 for an insalubrious stay at a mid-market hotel, plus all the hassle of rebooking flights. Even when they are CTM-related, many look like standard-issue administrative errors that have escalated in intensity simply because of the context, namely the stress and anxiety that the red list generates.
“Contracts like that keep the till open and turning over while the rest of the travel industry recovers. It’s a very reliable counterparty,” says Peter Drew, a director at Carter Bar Securities in Brisbane. “It has prevented them from incurring the really disastrous losses that we’ve seen in other businesses in the sector. It has kept the business stable.”CTM boss Jamie Pherous says the same thing. It’s actually because of COVID-19, he tells“We were doing reasonably well when everyone else was in a lot of trouble,” he says.
The teething problems and customer blowback during Britain’s first bout of hotel quarantine at the start of this year don’t seem to have dented Whitehall’s esteem.Not only was CTM recalled for this new bout of hotel quarantine - which ended last week, as omicron became bigger in Britain than it is in southern Africa - but it also worked on the Afghanistan evacuation.
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