‘I need a room’: overseas Hong Kong students struggling to book quarantine hotels for summer return to city
- Bulk of 66 quarantine hotels fully booked until end of July, while some hotels on new list of designated facilities only have availability from middle of August
- Students have been monitoring release of new hotels list, with one saying booking process for rooms is ‘exhausting’
Overseas Hong Kong students planning to fly back to the city during the summer are struggling to book quarantine hotels, with some being forced to pay nearly HK$2,000 (US$255) a night for a room and others spending hours tracking the availability of a new list of designated facilities.
An online search by the Post on Friday found most of the current batch of 66 designated hotels, whose terms expired by July 31, were fully booked till the end of next month. A few hotels told the Post they only had two to three rooms left for June and July.
The government on Thursday released a new list of 62 quarantine hotels for the period from August 1 to October 31, providing about 23,000 rooms. Prices for a standard hotel room range from HK$550 to HK$2,400 per night, while the cost for a luxurious suite room could go up to HK$60,000 for one person a night.
Under the current rules, arrivals must undergo seven days of quarantine at designated hotels if they are fully vaccinated, such as with two doses of Sinovac or BioNTech, and 14 days if they are not.
Some of the hotels on the new list started releasing their rooms for booking following the announcement, but most of the slots for early August were snapped up by Friday, and the earliest availability was in mid- or late August.
Jessica Wong, 22, a communications student on exchange in Amsterdam, described the booking process as “exhausting”. She said she had to spend seven hours to secure a room, despite starting her search as soon as the government released the details.
“It was almost 6am in the morning in Amsterdam when I could finally book a hotel,” she said, adding that she had been watching out for the new hotel list, as she had failed to book a room for June and July.
Wong said she needed to return to Hong Kong as her exchange programme would end next month and she did not have a place to stay in Amsterdam after that.