Industry News

Virus-blocking Soft Goods: The Future of Cruise Cleanliness

While efforts are being made in nearly every industry to improve cleanliness, cruise lines in particular are faced with the unique challenge of ensuring the health and safety of guests and crew within a contained environment, as they work to rebuild the confidence of vacationers.

So Your Hard Surfaces Are Clean… Now What?
In the wake of COVID-19, guests have even higher expectations for cleanliness – particularly when it comes to high-touch items like daybeds, pillows and other soft surfaces. While minimizing the spread of infection among guests and crew is a top priority for cruise lines, soft surfaces are often overlooked as vectors for contamination. As a result, contaminated soft surfaces undermine all other sanitization efforts by harboring pathogens in their cores.

Soft Surfaces: A Haven for Microbes
By their very design, traditional cushioning accumulates viruses, bacteria, dust, mold and other pathogens over time. With each use, these pathogens are expelled into the air, increasing the risk of infection. Despite diligent efforts by cruise line housekeeping and strict cleaning protocols, the cores of these soft goods cannot be effectively cleaned between each use, putting both guests and crew members at risk.

Spry Therapeutics has introduced a virus-blocking solution that prevents soft surface cores from collecting and expelling germs among guests and crew – Spry Pure™.

Spry’s Virus-blocking Technology
Spry Therapeutics is changing the way cruise lines view cushioning products onboard. Its Spry Pure product line employs Pneumapure^® filter technology, which has been independently tested and proven to block even the smallest “superbugs” — as small as .02 microns — from entering or exiting any soft surface. It is the only hermetically-sealed, breathable product line in the industry. The integration of the Pneumapure filter is simple and requires no additional action from cruise line personnel. The filter is applied to a slip that contains no stitching holes or zippers, which is then hermetically sealed around the core of any soft surface, such as a bed pillow or seat cushion. Once the filtered slip is applied, nothing but clean air can enter or exit the interior core — making it possible for housekeeping to effectively clean pillows, cushions, mattresses and the like between guests.

Clinically-proven Solution to Protect Guests & Crew
Spry’s filtered products have been proven effective in the most critical and high-risk environment – the hospital. Initial results of an ongoing study conducted at North Shore University Hospital (part of Northwell Health System) have shown that at the end of a six-month period of active use involving all patient units and the ER, no bacteria was detected on the interiors of any Spry pillows tested. In the post-pandemic landscape, the high standards of care and cleanliness that have been held across the healthcare industry are now crossing over into the hospitality and cruise industries. Now that the Pneumapure filter technology is available to the hospitality and cruise industries, cruise lines can rest assured their soft-goods are truly clean.

To read the full Cruise Industry News article, click here.