Melbourne couple in hotel quarantine say they ‘feel like prisoners’

A Melbourne plumber and his girlfriend say they “feel like prisoners” in hotel quarantine, after returning to Australia on a mercy flight from Peru last Friday.

Jack and Lani are holed up at the Travelodge in Docklands, where they are in their fifth day of 14 days of quarantine, along with some 200 other returned travellers.

They say the conditions aren’t good enough, and they’ve been served expired food on multiple occasions.

“The only thing we’ve got to look forward to is food at the moment and we’re only getting served food three times a day. The portion sizes are ridiculous, and we’ve had food out of date three or four times so far,” Jack told Tony Jones, filling in for Neil Mitchell.

“We’ve had what looks like pubic hairs in our food.

“It’s worse than a hostel.”

Jack said he’d rather have stayed in Peru than come home to this.

“At least we got the option to go outside, good quality food and more freedom,” he said.

Last night the travellers were told they are now allowed to order Uber Eats to the hotel, but Jack says it’s not a viable solution.

“We just can’t afford to be doing Uber Eats for the next 10 days … it’s not cheap!,” he said.

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But another returned Australian traveller who was on the same mercy flight home from Peru described a very different situation.

Monique told Tony Jones the catering provided to those in quarantine at the Travelodge in Docklands is “a substantial amount of food”.

“There was actually food already in our room when we arrived. We had a couple of breakfast boxes, some juice … They fed us lunch that day,” she said.

“A few of the comments that other guy was making, I thought they were a little bit inaccurate.

“I’m grateful for the opportunity to be in isolation in a comfortable place.”

Travelodge Docklands has released a statement about the matter:

“We take the utmost care with food preparation and if anything happens, we take immediate steps to rectify the situation. We acknowledge a misstep over the weekend with several items that were past their best before dates and delivered to a small number of guests at the hotel.  We apologised to those guests concerned and we replaced those food items as soon as it was brought to our attention. Procedures have since been put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

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