As restaurants and bars re-open or resume operations the following considerations should be kept in mind to protect employees, customers, and communities and slow the spread of COVID-19.

COVID-19 is mostly spread by respiratory droplets released when people talk, cough, or sneeze. It is thought that the virus may spread to hands from a contaminated surface and then to the nose or mouth, causing infection. Therefore, personal prevention practices (such as frequent hand washing, staying home when sick) and environmental cleaning and disinfection are important principles.  Fortunately, there are several additional actions operators of restaurants and bars can take to help lower the risk of COVID-19 exposure and spread.

Read further for the WHO guidelines and considerations for accommodation providers at this time for Restaurants, Breakfast, Dining Rooms and Bars. 

For the unforeseeable future, crowded breakfast buffets and packed bars will have to become a distant memory. While hygiene has always been a priority in these areas, the hustle and bustle of diners might have led to a lapse in frequent cleaning. In the fight against COVID-19, cramming strangers in a room with little to no time to disinfect surfaces and utensils at regular intervals will not be the best bet moving forward.

Alternatively, in-room dining service might become the hotel’s most popular option after a hotel opens again. With in-room dining, each guest-staff encounter is kept to a minimum and easier to track. It involves one staff to interact with one guest at any given time. However, a major challenge does remain: it is very staff-intensive. 

Some hotels have already begun to experiment with robot assistants who are able to deliver food and other requested items to a guest room. Guests who prefer to limit their human-to-human interaction by staying in their room, and thus order room service, might be positively surprised to see a robot outside their door delivering their order.

To pull this off, hotel staff will need a powerful interface to exchange information with the robots, and to dispatch the guest orders. FCS Connect can be integrated with Savioke, a leading robot manufacturer for hotels and hospitals, to effectively dispatch and track orders from a single platform on the web or a mobile app.

The room service team of the future will most likely be headed by a hotel employee who will receive orders, communicate with the kitchen via a POS and manage its robot colleagues via FCS Connect.

Another area that has the opportunity to be transformed rapidly as a result of this pandemic is the handling of maintenance job requests in kitchens and restaurants, as well as hygiene checklists. A big portion of the HACCP standard includes, for example, the careful recording of the temperature of a fridge. Historically it has been done on a flimsy paper taped to the door of the fridge with a pen shared by the entire kitchen staff. This is where FCS Engineering comes in.