trending Some in the travel industry are stepping up with offers for everything from online yoga classes to storage space for displaced students. With flights canceled around the world, and bars and restaurants shutting down as efforts to control coronavirus cases accelerate, some hotels, cultural institutions and car rental companies are extending a helping hand with efforts that range from community outreach to fee waivers. Others, including museums, are coming up with virtual offerings. Enterprise car rental is waiving fees for prepaid rentals and is dropping fees if customers need to drive cars and drop them off at a different location from the pickup points.
“If your doctor says you can’t fly home at this time, and you need to drive the car back to Michigan, the drop-off fees will be waived,” a customer service representative said. The holistic-minded Soul Community Planet’s 49-room property in Redmond, Ore. , typically offers weekly yoga and meditation classes in partnership with Namaspa Yoga & Massage; these have transitioned online through the Zoom app or Facebook live and are posted on the hotel’s Facebook timeline for everyone to use. “A lot of our community members have formed great relationships with the instructors, and since it’s currently socially irresponsible to gather in groups right now, they get to interact with the instructors they know, online,” said the chief executive, Ken Cruse.
Many cultural institutions, including museums, are bringing their collections to armchair travelers. The digital platform, Google Arts & Culture, has partnered with more than 2,000 cultural institutions from 80 countries, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Exhibitions feature works like Vincent Van Gogh’s “Terrace of a Café at Night,” from the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands, to modern art collections from the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan. Irvin Lippman, executive director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida has just started a series of free online programs for children called “Keep Kids Smart with ART” to help families who can’t travel but want to foster creativity at home.
“We are still developing these digital programs for all ages, not only for children, but also for seniors,” Mr. Lippman said. The museum and art school, which opened in 1950, normally receives more than 100,000 annual visitors. The moving and storage company U-Haul, which has 22,000 truck and trailer-sharing locations, is offering 30 days of free storage to students who have been displaced.
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Jeremy Collins, a U-Haul representative, said that “for serious conditions in the world, we’ve typically offered people a free month of storage. ” (Storage rates for a 5-by-10-foot unit typically start from $99. 95 per month). The six-year old Gaythering hotel in Miami, which caters to the L.
G. B. T.
“Q.”
community, has taken its weekly karaoke, bingo and trivia nights online. The drag queen Karla Croqueta hosted a virtual karaoke night on Instagram on Monday, March 16 from 8 to 10 p. m. , which drew 485 viewers.
“We sang Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ and Salt-N-Pepa’s ‘Shoop’ and we could have kept going,” the co-owner Alex Guerra said. Virtual Trivia nights are on Wednesdays at 8 p. m. , and Bingo nights are on Thursdays at 9 p.
m. , on the property’s social media channels. “When kids are stuck at home, they can still travel the world through storybooks,” said the author Sucheta Rawal, who has written a series of five “Beato Goes To” books, in which the main character, an explorer cat, visits places from Greenland to Japan. Children around the world are invited to join 30-minute-long live session to “meet” the author and listen to a book reading; sessions are held on her Facebook page.
Silvia Grossi, executive chef of the 44-room villa, Il Salviatino, in Fiesole, near Florence, Italy, has taken to social media to host cooking lessons from her own kitchen. She said that these are “easy recipes that can be created with ingredients most people already have in their homes — flour, spices, canned foods and eggs, for example. ” Her Instagram stories are conducted in Italian and have had an “uplifting response,” she said. “It’s incredible how connected we are, even when apart.
” She kicked off her lessons with a homemade whole grain pici pasta (a thick, hand-rolled pasta), garnished with spring onions, spices and bergamot. The wine educator Caroline Conner, who works with tourists in Lyon, France, is hosting free virtual wine tastings that meet through the Zoom app, for six people at a time. “I’ll talk them through how to write a tasting note, we’ll compare our wines and hopefully have a fun, distracting and social experience,” she said. Participants can sign up and see the complete schedule here.
The 85-room Hari hotel in Belgravia, London, is supporting its neighborhood by lending a helping hand to those in need in the form of grocery and general shopping services, collecting supplies from the pharmacy and even being on-hand for a friendly phone call. “Hotels have a kind of responsibility to provide their community with what they really need,” said the general manager Andrew Coney, adding that the property has started working with local suppliers and has helped 40 to 50 households in just a few days. “The response has been phenomenal. ” If you live in London, send @theharilondon a direct message through Instagram or email info@thehari.
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