“Everyone who has been in
contact with that person for
15 minutes or more at a time
is taken out and quarantined.
So if that person wasn't careful
in the lunch room or while stopping
to talk, they have to be taken out of the
workplace.”
—ELLA KENT, Director of Rooms at Sea Island Resort
when it first reopened on June 5, but
when the hotel reopened on June 11,
the spa’s steam and sauna reopened at
reduced capacity. Masks were not mandatory
for guests at the time, in part because
mask-wearing was deeply
controversial in Georgia, says Kent, but
also because the spa industry had not
yet fully coalesced around the efficacy
of mandatory mask wearing for guests
as it has now.
The spa was operating safely under
the new sanitation guidelines. Then, a
member of Sea Island’s hotel staff
tested positive for COVID-19 around
midsummer. Despite screening for temperatures
and COVID-19 symptoms, ‘patient
zero’ at Sea Island was
asymptomatic—without a test, there
was no way to know. The staff member
was not in a guest-facing position, and
they did not contract COVID-19 at Sea
Island Resort, but rather at a restaurant
or bar in the local area.
Once that first person tested positive,
Sea Island enacted its robust
COVID-19 plan, which required the
quarantining of every employee who
had been in close contact with the infected
individual.
That is what makes a single case of
COVID-19 in a spa or hotel so challenging—despite
‘patient zero’ not being a
spa employee, anyone who was in contact
with them for more than 15 minutes
had to be quarantined. Despite
no real ‘outbreak’ of COVID-19, the spa
soon found its staff decimated by a single
case. “Everyone who has been in
contact with that person for 15 minutes
or more at a time is taken out and quarantined,”
Kent says. “So if that person
wasn’t careful in the lunch room or
while stopping to talk, they have to be
taken out of the workplace.” When one
of the spa’s support staff soon tested
positive, The Spa at Sea Island had to
quarantine virtually all of its leadership
and support staff, leaving itself with
just a few unexposed employees to run
the spa.
CREATIVE SOLUTIONS
To deal with the shortage of staff, The
Spa at Sea Island shortened its hours to
five days a week from 10 am to 5 pm
for the two-week duration of the staff’s
quarantine. This allowed the spa to run
with a small number of support staff
working 40 hours per week. One spa coordinator
worked from home during
their quarantine window to call guests
and reschedule them to fit the spa’s altered
hours of operations.
Another thing to consider if your
spa staff needs to work from home
while quarantining: laptops. “We
found we didn’t have enough laptops!”
adds Kent. “We’re not willing to
risk all of that data on a personal
computer.” Allowing quarantined staff
to work from home freed up the inperson
staff to focus just on guest interaction,
rather than computer work
or logistics.
In the spa itself, Kent stepped back
into the role of spa director while the
spa’s full-time director quarantined.
After screening out staff who had potentially
been exposed, Kent was able
to staff her spa with one front-desk
worker and one back-of-house worker
during the spa’s operating hours.
ADJUSTING FOR THE FUTURE
Since quarantining much of her staff,
Kent has closed the steam room and
sauna at The Spa at Sea Island. “More
and more data is coming out that suggests
COVID-19 can stay airborne. We
don’t know how long it lingers,” Kent
says. Closing a space like a steam
room and sauna—where sanitation
and social distancing are difficult—
just made sense. All guests are now
required to wear masks, although
guest pushback continues.
When asked for her advice to fellow
spa leaders, Kent stresses that spa
directors need to be as concerned
with the social distancing of their employees
as they are with their guests.
Says Kent, “You can’t take it for
granted that they’ll read a memo and
comply. It’s just against our nature. No
one intentionally broke the physical
distancing rules.” Humans are social
creatures, but that social nature can
lead to a domino effect within a spa.
Spa leaders need to be prepared
for this eventuality, Kent also suggests.
“It’s going to happen. You need
to have a frank conversation with
your employees about their responsibilities
when they’re not at work. Assume
that everyone who works for
you and everyone who walks through
the door has COVID-19.” In addition to
building an action plan as thorough
and safe as Sea Island’s, Kent recommends
that spa leaders also crosstrain
their team members to cover for
each other in the event of absences. n
SEPTEMBER 2020 ■ PULSE 19