Over a thousand hotel guests, casino patrons and staffers have been stranded in three hotels under the Jin Bei Group in Cambodia after the local government ordered the hotels to immediately suspend business on 23 February upon the discovery that a Chinese woman confirmed with Covid-19 had stayed at the hotels.
Informed sources tell Allin Media that the Chinese woman confirmed with Covid-19 works at a nightclub in Preah Sihanouk Province, Cambodia. The 35-year-old nightclub hostess travelled by bus from Phnom Penh to Preah Sihanouk Province on 16 February and stayed at three hotels under the Jin Bei Group. She is said to be a long-term tenant of the hotels.
According to local media reports, the health authorities of Preah Sihanouk Province began to conduct Covid-19 tests on some of the foreign visitors on 22 February, and two Chinese women had been tested positive. The other woman is 22 years old and she arrived at Preah Sihanouk Province from Phnom Penh on 20 February.
As one of the women has been staying at the three hotels under Jin Bei Group, the local government immediately ordered the hotels to suspend business and deployed military police to cordon off the hotel premises and the two adjacent staff dormitories. According to the local government, the hotels had to be cordoned off for 14 days; nobody would be allowed to leave the premises during this period.
As a result, over a thousand people, including more than 200 hotel guests and gamblers, have been stranded inside the premises.
Cambodia has been popular with Chinese gamblers in recent years and its gaming industry has grown rapidly. However, the number of Chinese visitors to the country has dropped drastically due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The three hotels under Jin Bei Group have been renting out their rooms on short-term leases to cope with the fall in visitors in the wake of the pandemic. Allin Media have learnt that the occupancy rate of the hotels at the time of police enclosure was around 70 percent. More than a hundred guests were stranded at the restaurants and casinos inside the hotels at the time.
The nightclub where the 35-year-old woman works is below one of the Jin Bei hotels, but it does not belong to the Jin Bei Group.
