We had planned to travel to Barcelona on Thursday evening, on the 12th of March. My girlfriend unfortunately got sick on Wednesday morning. At the moment she only had mild symptoms and we were not sure if she had the corona virus or not. Our hotel booking was not refundable but under the circumstances we did not want to put the health of the other hotel guests at risk and we therefore contacted the hotel, in order to discuss our options. We did not ask for a refund, we just asked if we could change the dates of our booking. The answer was simply NO. The hotel showed absolutely no flexibility and most importantly zero interest for the health of their other guests. Their reply was that we are welcome to visit the hotel according to our booking, even if one of us is positive to the corona virus, otherwise our booking would be canceled with no refund.
Driven from our personal consciousness we finally canceled all our plans and we did not travel to Barcelona. Fortunately the results of the test came out on Friday and my girlfriend was negative to the virus. It was just a normal flu.
We fully understand the tremendous pressure that this situation brings to all kinds of businesses, especially in the tourism sector. There are hundreds of people DYING EVERY DAY because of the virus however and one would expect that the social responsibility of each and every business would be the appropriate under the circumstances. Such irresponsible behavior is totally unacceptable from our point of view and is definitely one of the main reasons that has led to the outbreak of the virus in Spain and in other countries.
The least we can do is make sure that such behavior does not go unnoticed. We need to remember those, who only cared for their own short term interests and nothing else, when the whole world was facing a tragedy. We never stayed at the hotel, it may well be the best in the world. In our opinion, however, a hotel that shows zero interest for the safety of its guests, is a hotel that should go out of business.