As of Feb. 22, air travelers to Canada must take a COVID test upon arrival and quarantine in a qualifying hotel until their results are in, reports Global News. That can take up to three days, but in the case of Cristina Teixeira, her results were in after just one night—but that's where the good news ends for her. Teixeira says she was charged about $2,750 for that single-night stay, and is lobbing blame at both the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the Canadian government. Teixeira was flying home to Ontario with her brother and daughter after traveling to Portugal for her father's funeral. She tells CTV News that she struggled to get details about the hotel quarantine program while abroad and was denied an exemption upon arrival in Toronto when she explained the reason for her trip. She was told to book a room at the Crowne Plaza, an approved quarantine hotel.
The hotel informed her there was a minimum of three nights, at $610 a night plus taxes. "At this point it was 1:30 in the morning, we were exhausted and we just agreed," she explains. Some 15 hours later, their results were in, but she says the hotel wouldn't budge on charging them for the three nights at the quarantine rate. "If I were to walk off the street that room would have cost me $159 plus $10 per extra person," Teixeira says. "The government has not really figured out the plan. It's literally just horrible." A column at the National Post agrees. It calls out the "staggering ineptitude" of the government's approach, which was modeled off of New Zealand's but with unreasonable economics: PM Justin Trudeau announced it would likely cost travelers $1,500 for those three nights, while under New Zealand's plan, it was about $2,000 for a two-week quarantine. (More quarantine stories.)
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