Woods: Hotel union members excited to return to mega resort

Bahamas Hotel Catering and Allied Workers Union (BHCWU) President Darrin Woods said yesterday his members are excited about being able to support themselves now that Atlantis has reopened and other hotel properties are preparing to open next week.

Some 2,500 employees returned to the property for its first day open since closing back in March because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Woods said his members are relieved they no longer have to depend on handouts to survive.

“They’re excited, the majority of them are excited who are in the first phase to get back to work after eight and a half months of being home,” he told Guardian Business.

“Of course they would like to actually be able to work and support themselves as opposed to relying on assistance from the various places.”

While yesterday was the first official reopening day for the mega resort, Woods said most employees in his union began working on Monday.

“Well today is the day that the hotel actually opened but they’ve been going back, most of them, since Monday and we had a pretty big group that went back, starting from two weeks back. The engineering department, the grounds department and those who have to make it ready,” he said.

“Then the housekeepers started to go in, then the restaurant workers had to go and do orientation for cleaning under the new COVID-19 standards.”

Atlantis has revealed it will reopen in phases. Woods said his hope is that the resort continues to seek bookings so that the remainder of employees can soon return to work.

“They are unsure as to the gap between the phases because our industry is driven by occupancy. So it will all depend on how many persons begin to travel and that will indicate how many persons they can bring back and how many days they are supposed to be working,” he said.

Looking ahead to next week, Woods said other union members are anxious about the other hotel openings. Baha Mar and the British Colonial Hilton are both scheduled to reopen next week.

“They pretty much feel the same way because all of them would have been home for basically the same length of time. With the Hilton announcing it is opening next week, our concern with them is that that’s a business hotel, so we need to see what type of clientele will be travelling at this time. So that’s the concern that we have for that particular hotel and some of the other ones that are opening,” Woods said.

In order for its employees to return to work, Atlantis required them to be tested on a weekly basis and to produce a negative RT-PCR molecular test.

Woods said while he believes this is an important measure for employees, the same should be extended to guests of the resort.

“We would like to see the same for the guests. We know that the guests coming in originally only had to show a test not more than five days old, but what happens to persons who take the test on day one or day two, before they are ready to travel and they come into contact with an infected person? We wouldn’t know that until five or six days while they are here. We believe there should still be an initial test to ensure that they are still negative,” he said.

“But that being the case, we are monitoring our members to ensure that when they go to work, they follow all the protocols that are put in place. They are put in place to ensure their safety, the safety of the guests and by extension their families, because that’s who they have to go back home to.”

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