SINGAPORE 29 October 2020: How clean is your hotel room? There have been countless experiments conducted by sceptical guests to detect microorganisms in their hotel rooms, but with health top-of-mind, the search for a squeaky clean room, SARS-CoV-2 free, becomes a priority.
As many as 92% of travellers prioritize cleanliness based on a Tripadvisor study earlier this year. Given that Covid-19 has rampaged the global hospitality industry, the chances of booking a room that was once used for quarantine purposes are incredibly high. More than half of the 67,000 hotels rooms in Singapore have been enlisted at some time or the other.
Singapore is enforcing even stricter safety precautions against harmful microorganisms such as the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus while easing up rules under Phase 3 of its response plan, which involves allowing larger size group gatherings.
This also includes the government’s plan to issue SGD100 worth of SingapoDiscovers vouchers to every Singaporean to spur the revival of local tourism businesses.
Vouchers are only valid for hotels that have received the ”SG Clean” stamp from the Singapore Tourism Board through its various audit and certification programmes. This exposes the urgent need to upgrade the adoption of smart cleaning systems using UV-C light to disinfect rooms.
Early leader
Founded earlier this year, the Singapore-based company, Smart Spruce, uses a UV-C sterilization Smart Light with Artificial Intelligence IoT cleaning that meets hygiene and safety demands. The cloud-connected system monitors cleanliness and generates alerts with key parameters such as occupancy, humidity, volatile organic components (VOCs), particles in the air, and cleaning schedules. Centred around the 253.7nm low-pressure mercury UV-C light bulb technology the system can sterilize 200 rooms simultaneously within 35 minutes.
Committed to its slogan of ‘Making Clean Visible’, SmartSpruce’s SmartUV system claims to be the first of its kind to incorporate a cloud-based dashboard which includes a safety interlock mechanism that includes motion detection.
Currently, SmartSpruce is in the pilot test phase with models in place at hotels in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.
The system could generate SGD14.8 million in revenue based on 14,000 hotel rooms sterilized over its first three years of operation.
The pilot test’s progress and evaluation, fundraising goals as well as SmartSpruce’s product launch is now set for January 2021.
