A teenage hotel quarantine guard has been sacked after asking a guest out for coffee, the NCA Newswire reports.
The info was revealed during Victoria’s Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, and is said to have happened at the Pan Pacific hotel. Not only would asking a quarantined quest out be a potentially uninvited and creepy abuse of power, but it’s also not really in the spirit of social distancing, which is the whole point of hotel quarantine.
While the guest was leaving rubbish outside her door, the guard allegedly said something along the lines of: “Hey would you consider having a coffee with me once this quarantine period is over?”
“The guard states that the guest had smiled at him and closed her hotel door,” Dan Banks, from the security firm which subcontracted the guard, Signal 88, wrote in a submission to the inquiry.
“The guard in question is 19 years old and when spoken to, he admitted making the comment, appreciated that in the circumstances it was inappropriate and he was very apologetic.”
When other staff investigated the incident at the time, the guard allegedly said he asked the woman out because she had smiled at him.
He added that they both “exchanged pleasantries such as ‘how are you’, ‘good morning’ and so on,” apparently mistaking common courtesy as an invitation to hit on someone.
The man was just one of several guards who’ve been sacked after abusing their positions of power to hit on female guests, including one who told a a guest to add him on Snapchat.
Another two guards from the same company, Signal 88, were also sacked for watching on as a male hotel guest shouted at and was abusive towards a female nurse.
The inquiry is ongoing, and hopefully by the end of it, we’ll have some answers as to how Victoria got into this whole mess.
