The Hong Kong government announced on Tuesday that it will add seven more hotels to the current list of Designated Quarantine Hotels (DQHs). Starting April 14, Royal Pacific Hotel, the Kowloon Hotel and Cordis, Hong Kong will no longer be Community Isolation Facilities (CIFs) and will instead be used to accommodate quarantining international arrivals. Starting May 1, four hotels previously reserved for quarantining foreign domestic helpers (FDHs) will also be opened to all international travellers.
Royal Pacific Hotel, the Kowloon Hotel and Cordis, Hong Kong won’t be available for the entire seventh cycle, which began March 1, 2022 and ends July 31, 2022. The government’s official quarantine hotel list states that they will be available until mid-June 2022.
The four hotels that previously only housed quarantining domestic workers, Courtyard by Marriott Hong Kong Sha Tin, iclub Ma Tau Wai Hotel, O’Hotel, and Rambler Garden Hotel, will start accepting reservations from all international arrivals on April 19 for May bookings. This arrangement will not affect FDHs who have already made a reservation at these four hotels.
The government has been expanding its list of DQHs ever since it announced that, beginning April 1, the quarantine period for incoming travellers would be reduced to a minimum of seven days from the previous 14-day requirement. On the same day, the 9-country flight ban – on Australia, Canada, France, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Britain, and the US – was lifted, allowing many Hong Kong residents who had been stranded overseas to return to the SAR.
On March 26, 13 DQHs that had previously been converted into CIFs to house local Covid-19 cases returned to operating as DQHs for incoming travellers. With the latest additions, there will be 45 DQHs with over 14,000 rooms available to international arrivals beginning May 1.
Header image credits: Sino Hotels
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