Is this the end of norovirus?

I have just had an amazing night on board P&O’s new flagship Britannia. She far exceeded my expectations and I am looking forward to selling her.

However she did have a few strange features on board which I was not altogether convinced by. Namely the lack of anti bacterial gel and instead the installation of taps outside of the restaurants.

These did look very funky and contemporary and to start with I thought they were a great idea. However logistically they didn’t really work. When there is a queue of people waiting to enter a restaurant anti bacterial gel can be applied quickly and easily and you can continue to rub it in as you walk towards your table.  Washing hands takes much longer, each person has to turn the tap on, wash their hands, turn it off again, take a towel and then dry their hands in situ in order to dispose of the wet towel. Only once this has all been completed can they enter the restaurant.

This may seem like a small thing but when a restaurant is admitting several hundred people at once it can be very time consuming. The end result on the trip that I was on was that by the second meal time very few people were washing their hands and instead  most walked straight into the restaurant un-sanitized.

P&O are not alone in this switch to hand washing as a way of cleansing, I believe Royal Caribbean’s Quantum Class ships have similar hand wash basins installed although I am yet to go on one myself and check this out. However I have been told that Royal Caribbean provide anti bacterial gel as well.

There are also many ships that have a lot of gel on board and still suffer bouts of norovirus, so maybe it is less about the method of cleaning hands that applies in the prevention of norovirus and more about educating passengers to actually use the water or gel provided instead of walking straight past it.

We will wait and see how healthy Britannia and her hand washing passengers remain.

#cruisewall #Britannia #P&O #cruise