Attack on Egyptian resort raises hotel security questions

TERRORISTS have attacked planes, nightspots, trains and hotels.

With the July 23 resort bombings at Sharm el Sheik, Egypt, lodging may be the latest front in the terrorists’ war on travel.

How safe are hotels from a terrorist attack? Not very, several security experts say, and they’re not likely to get safer in the U.S. unless there’s a major attack on lodging here -- a situation that seems chillingly reminiscent of the innocent days of U.S. commercial aviation before Sept. 11, 2001.

In our post-Sept. 11 world, we thread through concrete barriers and send bags through X-ray scanners at airports and government buildings. We wave ID cards to enter our workplaces. But we often stroll unchallenged into hotel lobbies.

“The lodging industry is woefully unprepared for a catastrophic event,” said John C. Fannin III, a 30-year veteran of security and safety consulting who heads SafePlace Corp. of Wilmington, Del., which aims to accredit hotels for safety standards.

Christopher Grniet, vice president of the security consulting and engineering division of Kroll Inc., is also worried.

“We have to be more stringent,” said Grniet, whose international risk-consulting company is based in New York. “Hotels have got to really understand that they’re at risk for these types of events.”

Yet traditionally, hotel architects have focused on countering such dangers as crime, fires and natural disasters -- which are, after all, far more common than bombings, said Richard Penner, who teaches hotel design and development at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

“In many cases, there is only token acknowledgment of the terrorism threat,” he said.

Security experts say some hotels may be jeopardizing lives by failing to adequately control access to their driveways, lobbies and guest floors. They may also fail to demand photo IDs from guests, screen vehicles in underground parking, monitor the premises on closed-circuit TV or install checkpoints or barriers to discourage car bombers.

It’s not clear how many hotels have adopted these safeguards, they said, because there’s no recent national survey on this topic and no widely accepted security standards for the U.S. lodging industry.

Joseph McInerney, president and chief executive of the American Hotel & Lodging Assn. in Washington, D.C., rejected claims that his industry is indifferent to the threat.

“Hotels are very worried about security,” he said. But, he added, some security experts would like hotels to be “armed camps,” and that’s not realistic.

“Unfortunately, we’re in the hospitality industry and open 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said.

Precautions hotels commonly take, he said, aren’t apt to thwart an attack like the one against the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Sharm el Sheik, where a suicide bomber rammed a truck through a glass facade and went into the lobby.

“That is a problem,” McInerney said. It may be impossible, for instance, to install barriers in front of a hotel on a city street.

But solving security problems poses others.

“Hotels want to be seen as welcoming people,” Cornell’s Penner said. “They don’t want to put up concrete barriers or inspect backpacks and suitcases as people come into the hotel.”

Kroll’s Grniet put it more bluntly. Hoteliers, he said, fear that “if I start screening my clientele, I will lose that clientele. People can go down the street to the next hotel.”

Fannin saw a mixture of motives for hotels that might resist security standards, including reluctance to fund expensive upgrades and what he called “liability paranoia.”

“They feel: If we put in the cameras and the cameras miss something, we’re going to get sued for it,” he said.

But most experts and industry leaders I spoke with said that at least some U.S. hotels have worked to tighten security.

Richard M. Santoro, senior vice president of corporate security with the hotel casino division of Trump Entertainment, in Atlantic City, N.J., said that after the Sept. 11 attacks, his hotels stopped accepting cash deposits on rooms and began requiring photo IDs from everyone at check-in. Access to guest-room floors is restricted.

The hotels bought traffic barricades, which they move around in response to alerts or threats.

“We may also deploy vehicles that require people to ... zigzag around them,” Santoro said.

Such precautions can save lives. A car bomber who attacked the JW Marriott Hotel Jakarta in Indonesia in 2003 was blocked at a checkpoint about 30 yards from the hotel entrance, said Alan Orlob, vice president of corporate security for Marriott’s international division.

“If we had no vehicle checks, we quite frankly think he would have driven all the way into the lobby, and there would have been massive casualties,” Orlob said. As it was, 12 people died in the blast, including one guest.

As a visitor, you can also take steps to reduce your chances of being a victim, said John Briley, senior managing editor of IJet Intelligent Risk Systems, a travel security company based in Annapolis, Md. IJet experts suggest:

* In a foreign country, stay at locally owned and operated hotels. These are less likely to be targets of anti-Western extremists.

* Avoid hotels on major thoroughfares or next to embassies or popular tourist spots.

* Look for gated hotels with long driveways and multiple security layers between the street and the building.

* When making a reservation, ask whether the hotel has a 24-hour security program, including surveillance cameras.

“The chance of a traveler being the target of a terrorist attack or even impacted by it is utterly minuscule,” Briley said.

Statistically accurate, no doubt. But when it comes to hotels and lodging, I’m getting that Sept. 11 feeling again.

Hear more tips from Jane Engle on Travel Insider topics at latimes.com/engle. She welcomes comments but can’t respond individually to letters and calls. Write to Travel Insider, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A., CA 90012, or e-mail jane.engle@latimes.com.