Doha Festival City introduces touchless elevators for safe shopping experience

Touchless elevators at Doha Festival City

Doha Festival City has partnered with Schindler to deploy new touchless technology across 32 elevators to aid in preventing cross-infection when interacting with elevator buttons. 

The new technology was designed and manufactured by Schindler, a Swiss pioneering elevators’, escalators’ and moving walks’ manufacturer that uses avant-garde technology focused on the utmost comfort and safety of users. 

Committed to preserving health and wellbeing of its customers, Doha Festival City regularly upgrades its systems to offer the safest shopping solutions across the mall. The elevators’ new advanced technology includes a touchless control panel allowing the users to command the lift without physically touching any button. It contains a remote sensing unit through which a user can indicate the desired floor by simply waving a finger across the panel.  

Commenting on the launch, Doha Festival City General Manager, Robert Hall, said “In these unprecedented times, we are delighted to introduce new touchless elevators across Doha Festival City.  Thanks to the well-devised strategy to combat the pandemic adopted by the local authorities and an efficient vaccination campaign, Qatar is witnessing a record drop in cases and a progressive return to normality. However, safety remains of paramount significance in this post-Covid world and remains an important part of the Mall’s operational strategy, and we will continue to introduce new solutions to deliver the safest and the smoothest shopping experience for all our customers.”

Doha Festival City opening hours are Saturday to Wednesday from 10am to 10 pm, and Thursday to Friday from 10am to 11pm. Children of all ages are now allowed to enter the mall.  Doha Festival City also continues to apply stringent health and safety measures throughout its premises in line with the government’s preventative measures. A thorough mall disinfection treatment is carried out on a weekly basis, in addition to robust cleaning and sanitization operations during mall trading hours. 127 hand sanitizing stations are installed in the areas that have commonly touched surfaces. 

At the entrance to the mall and all shops, visitors must show their green Ehteraz QR code, and should wear a face mask during their whole time in the mall. Physical distancing stickers in common queuing areas, such as ATM machines, banks, telecommunication kiosks and branches and various retail shops were installed to help shoppers keep the required physical distance as set forth in the guidelines by the authorities. Stores will provide sanitizers on entry and at cash points to ensure the highest level of hygiene.