In one of the best Seinfeld episodes ever, George is trying to get a bigger apartment in his building only to find out that a survivor of the Andrea Doria shipwreck got it because the coop board felt bad for the guy. Read the script below:
The buffet can be the real ordeal on cruise ships because its when the guests are all touching utensils, and if anyone of them is sick and didn’t wash their hands very well, you could pick up a bad case of Norovirus. I got this cruise ship norovirus outbreak data below from http://www.cruiseminus.com/cruise-ship-norovirus/.
What I think is interesting is that most of the outbreaks affect less that 10% of guests, the average is 7.3%. The news makes it seem that the whole ship is hold up in their rooms in agony when in reality only 1132 people were sickened out of 20,027 passengers. I don’t want to make light of ruined vacations, and I’ve heard that Norovirus illness is brutal. It is just more evidence that the news media is looking out for themselves and their ratings above all else.
Please enjoy this blog originally published on 3/22/16:
I recently completed a cruise on the Disney Fantasy, and I noticed quite a few norovirus prevention measures being employed by Disney on the cruise that I wanted to point out. I must state for the record that I didn’t go into the kitchens or interview any of the team members, these are just my observations on what I saw Disney doing as a passenger on the ship, I think you will find some of these measures interesting.
Returning to the boat from being on-shore there is always a sanitizer station and a crew member requesting that you sanitize your hands. The crew member looked at me like I was crazy when I was taking this picture but then when I got done and started to walk onto the ship she asked me to sanitize my hands. You are going to see that most of what Disney does, pertains to hand washing, but that is probably one of the most important anti-norovirus measures you can take besides supply chain safety.
Here are two different hand washing direction signs posted for passengers. One was in our cabin bathroom, and one was in a public restroom. Norovirus is commonly spread when people have fecal matter or vomit on their hands and then touch ready made food or buffet utensils, or they get their germs on a fork or plate, and a crew member touches those items while bussing a table and then could spread it to themselves or other guests. I thought this was a very rational and different approach to battling norovirus. In the industry, we are used to seeing hand washing signs for the crew but not in restrooms for customers. Cruise ships are very densely packed, and isolated places and norovirus could just as easily be spread from a guest to a crew member as the other way around.
Here is an example of a sign that I have never seen before in a public restroom. This sign says to use a paper towel to avoid touching doorknobs. The OCD part of me loves this sign.
It doesn’t matter which restaurant you are going to on the ship: a buffet, a sit-down, or a quick service outlet. There are always anti-bacterial towels in dispensers, on the counter, or being passed out by a crew member. There are two dinner seatings every night, and when there is a mass seating in a dining room, there are several crew members standing at the door handing out wipes to every passenger.
Other things that I noticed:
- All crew members that were handling food on the buffets were wearing gloves.
- I watched crew members changing out utensils on the buffet mid shift replacing with fresh utensils.
- They have an over abundant amount of crew members cleaning and sanitizing tables in between guests.
- On the welcome aboard video, they point out where the ship’s doctor is located and ask you to please report there if you start to feel ill, they also discuss proper hand washing.
- Any piece of equipment that a lot of passengers come in contact with is cleaned regularly. For instance, you will see a crew member assigned to keeping the soda station on deck 11 clean and stocked all day long.
- Across the ship, you will see crew members wiping railing and stuff down as a regular part of their daily cleaning routines.
- The Cabana’s buffet probably serves a couple of thousand people for breakfast and lunch every day. It is one of the cleanest buffets that I have ever seen, you just don’t see food spillage on it, there are people maintaining every station during service.
One last thing that I thought was cool was this portable electric faucet, see below. This faucet was set up at an outdoor smoothie station in the middle of a sidewalk on shore. There was no running water to this station as it is portable. The station has two buckets, 1 for clean potable water, and the second for waste water. Having personally worked a lot of outdoor events at country clubs and restaurants this was the first time I had ever seen one of these devices.
Some things that Disney does on the cruise ship would be easy to duplicate in our restaurants, and some things would be harder because of the difference in labor spending and labor rates. Obviously having hand sanitizer in your restaurant in the entrance way or passing our sanitizer wipes when guests are seated would be very easy to do. Paying to have a person stand in the doorway of your restaurant to hand out sanitizer wipes would probably not be cost effective. Bathroom signs when done well don’t bother me.
If you think about this from Disney’s perspective, they have two main things they have to worry about. If they get passengers sick, then they have a bunch of angry customers and like the rest of us, they risk the long term brand damage that it causes. They pride themselves on being a premium product. They also have to keep their teams safe and healthy because once they are at sea, they can’t call in other people. Imagine a scenario where a couple hundred of their crew and passengers get sick on a cruise; it would stress their entire system and with the close quarters on a cruise ship and limited resources, it could be a real mess for them and cost them a lot of money. I think there were over 4,000 passengers and 1,500 crew members on our cruise.
I hope you found these precautions interesting and if you would like to learn more about how OpsAnalitica helps you run safer, better, and more profitable restaurant check out our demo video here.