Guests staying at Crystalbrook Collection resorts throughout Australia will no longer be able to trade in cash from 1 July as the company moves to eliminate another potential health concern as part of a COVID-19 crackdown.
Proven as a method of transferring germs and bacteria, the use of cash has been discouraged by the Australian government during the Coronavirus pandemic, with contactless card transactions widely promoted as a safer method of payment. The move will see the company become Australia’s first entirely cashless hospitality company.
Crystalbrook has also increased the use of paperless and contactless check-in and check-out procedures, with complimentary face masks to be offered to guests across its resorts.
The company’s acting CEO, Geoff York, said the company saw an opportunity to change the way it thought and acted in a post-COVID world.
“When we looked into cash payments, we found very few customers wanted to pay by cash anyway.
“Then we looked into some of the research around cash and hygiene; it’s quite disconcerting. The average note can carry nasties including E. coli and Salmonella along with a host of 26,000 other bacteria. When you consider that cash is often in the same environment as food, such as in a restaurant setting, it seemed like common sense to us to remove that risk.”
Crystalbrook currently operates four resorts in Australia including Riley and Bailey in Cairns; Little Albion in Sydney and Byron at Byron in northern NSW. Its third Cairns resort, Flynn, will re-open to guests in October 2020, with Kingsley in Newcastle coming online in the first quarter of 2021.