It’s jarring to return to a five-star hotel room late at night and find the door propped open. But interrupting a pair of teenagers inside, as they rifle through your suitcase, is even more disconcerting. I should know—it happened to me. My reaction was instinctive: I barked at the boys to come to the lobby with me, only to watch them scramble out of a side door as soon as the elevator opened, and before hotel security could collar them. Fortunately, I was unharmed, and nothing was taken. But worse than the foiled burglary itself was the hotel’s reaction to it.
“There’s no need to call the police, sir—if you would just calm down,” said the night manager. (I was neither shouting nor swearing, though the situation probably deserved a modicum of both.) It was only after I threatened to remain at the front desk to discourage other guests from checking in that he grudgingly relented. I was determined to know how my room had been so easily accessed, and what measures that hotel would take to prevent the same things from happening to other guests. Was the room attendant incriminated? Had I been targeted? Was I careless, and entirely at fault?
Experts say my insistence on reporting the crime is unusual, perhaps because hotels prefer to discourage guests from turning the incident into a statistic, whether they’re one- or five-star spots. “Nine times out of ten, people who have an incident [in a hotel] don’t go to the police,” says criminologist Bob Arno, who specializes in travel safety. Such low reporting rates are one reason the topic of theft in hotels is so murky. One expert estimated that every day in a big-city hotel, there’s at least one crime committed—and it’s almost always theft. Even when a crime occurs, police don’t separate hotel-related thefts from other burglaries or petty larceny; unsurprisingly, hotel companies treat their properties as mini-republics, and are loath to make any internal figures public.
What little anecdotal and quantitative data is available only makes the topic more confusing. A 2009 joint study by professors at Ball State and Florida International universities showed that 38 percent of guest-related hotel thefts took place in hotel rooms rather than common areas. It certainly upticks during economic downturns, like the recent Great Recession, or when hotels make poor judgment calls. But Paul Frederick, the former vice president of global security for Starwood, who now runs his own firm, tells Condé Nast Traveler that, in his experience, 90 percent of theft is in public areas, and just 10 percent occurs in rooms. But no matter the percentage, it’s the room-related crime that seems most violating—an unwelcome intrusion on a supposedly safe space.
So how does such theft happen? After all, hotels are typically CCTV-monitored and well-staffed, whatever the time of day. And while it’s easy to pin petty crime on low-paid hospitality workers with property-wide access, in most cases, this is also extremely unfair. Frederick suggests that no more than two percent of on-property theft might be staff-related; lawyer Chris Johnston, who began his career as a bellman and then moved to management before setting up a specialty travel law firm, agrees. “The ones I hear most about tend to be rather petty—a guest who says ‘I had $40 sitting on the vanity here, I know I did, and it’s gone,’” Johnston says.
The greatest threat of theft doesn’t come from insiders but from opportunists, especially those who understand how hotels operate, says Arno. He’s nicknamed one common category of scammers the "door pushers," who stroll down the long corridors of hotels, arms outstretched, to see if the door will click open. All too often, they will. It’s because buildings change over time, and so require regular maintenance to adjust door-closing mechanisms for security; via budget cuts, sick days, or just mismanagement, that maintenance schedule might be missed, which means the door might not close as firmly as it should. Other would-be thieves even attempt a two-stage process: first tripping a fire alarm, which can neutralize door locks so firemen are able to access every room, and then entering whichever might have been improperly reset once the responders have left.
Some brazen thieves also pose as guests, a tactic Arno dubs the "loot n' scoot": a woman might appear during the mid-morning changeover, wearing a bikini and carrying a beach bag. She'll hunt down a housekeeping cart and duck into the room open next to it. “I think I’ve forgotten my key,” she’ll say, while rooting around, pretending to look for it. The maid will exit, allowing the swimsuit-clad thief to fill her bag with pilfered electronics and other small valuables.
By the far the most worrisome scenario, though, is the one which Arno himself experienced at a major corporate hotel. Fast asleep with his wife in a room, the door was opened by a stranger at 3 a.m—despite the deadbolt. “They hope you’re sleeping and drunk, so they can go in and lift something from you,” Armo says. If you wake, they can simply claim to have made a mistake in accessing the room, blaming mis-programmed key cards.
Hotel security latches are surprisingly easy to unhook, whether using a cable tie, or the hotel’s own key card. But high-tech lock mechanisms—the kind on which almost every key card-operated hotel room now relies—are often even more vulnerable. Matt Jakubowksi, a tech whiz who highlights security flaws before they are exploited, developed a lock-pick for keycard-operated systems by Onity, one of the most commonly used in the world; his master key-like device fit inside a dry erase marker and was made using components available at any hardware store. “In a nutshell, you can use that to open up any hotel door that uses that type of lock by plugging it in,” he says. In response, Onity issued a fix, though an analog one: a panel that covered the access port—which could be removed by a standard screwdriver.
Of course, such high-tech skullduggery is rare in hospitality, as is petty crime in general. Should you suffer from a theft, however, the problem is compounded by your limited recourse. It’s all thanks to liability-reducing statutes known as innkeeper laws, which date back to the earliest colonial era in America, and are a legacy of English law. Though the small print in each differs from state to state, they’re in effect across the country and act as a sort of shield.
“Very few businesses [other than hotels] in the United States have this limited liability,” says Stephen Barth, a lawyer and professor of hospitality. “The shield favors the innkeeper. The public rarely understands that.” The first burden of proof lies with the hotel, which must show it complied with the innkeeper law of that particular state (they vary widely; you can check details here). This usually involves posting warnings in conspicuous locations, like the back of a room door, and offering safety deposit boxes at the front desk. If the hotel can show it abided by these regulations, “then the burden is on the guest to demonstrate the hotel was somehow negligent, perhaps by allowing some unauthorized person to access your guest room,” says Barth. Of course, even with the help of an attorney, that can be a long, difficult process; guests who choose not to pursue it could find themselves entitled to as little as $100 in compensation, regardless of the value of what's missing—a sign of how much the laws favor indemnifying hotels rather than protecting consumers.
How, then, to minimize risk? Standalone insurance is vital—a policy that covers every trip you take in a calendar year should be around $249, depending on your state of residence. Look, too, for the phrase "document recovery coverage": if your passport or other vital papers are stolen, this clause will cover delays and transit costs associated with replacing it (if you miss a flight because you’re waiting for a new passport to be issued, for example). Consider supplementing the standard policy with item-specific backup via a company like Trov, which offers standalone insurance for precious possessions like laptops or jewelry; otherwise, check whether your home insurance also protects property while traveling. Most in-room hotel safes have override codes that allow GMs or senior staffers to access the contents in an emergency: if in doubt, store valuables in the safety deposit boxes behind the front desk. And while sleeping, don’t rely solely on that deadbolt or latch—instead, wedge the door shut with a fork from room service. Flipped over and slid under the door, it acts as a stopper that can’t be jimmied from the outside.
No such MacGyver could have prevented my situation, which involved two teenagers rummaging through my suitcase while I was out for supper. I was fortunate that nothing of value was taken before they were interrupted; in fact, since it was the end of a long trip, the pair mostly were faced with dirty laundry. When I pressed the hotel on its investigation, it could not confirm how the pair had accessed the room, only to say that the last time the key card was used had been during turndown by the maid before suppertime—my room was conveniently outside the coverage of most CCTVs. Perhaps, though, my experience was a statistical anomaly: Frederick stresses that experiences like mine are quite rare. In his three-decade career, he’s learned that many reports of in-room theft are mistaken. “I always had a policy of calling the person back after they got home, and following up, to say that we’d done our investigation but didn’t find the item,” he says, “Fifty percent of the time the person said, ‘Oh, I was going to call you— I found those earrings stuck in a sweater.' It usually ends up not to be a theft, just a lost and found.”