Hotel Security: Rooms Get Safes to Cut Thefts

How safe is your hotel room from theft?

It’s not an easy question to answer. On one hand, hotels don’t freely provide security information, and most police departments don’t keep individual theft statistics for hotels in their cities.

But certain facts are known. Interviews with executives at major hotel chains (all of whom declined to be identified, either by name or chain) revealed that in-room theft is on the rise, and that most of it is being done by people who have legitimate access to guest rooms--employees.

One U.S. Commerce Department survey indicates that employee theft is clearly on the rise, growing at the alarming rate of 15% a year.

As a result, more and more hotels are installing safes in guest rooms. More than 100,000 safes are now in U.S. hotel rooms. Two-thirds of them are mechanical but a growing number are electronic, and cost up to $650 each.

Opportunity, Motive

“Theft is based on opportunity and motive,” says David Pollard, vice president of ServiSystems, a leading manufacturer of hotel room safes.

“In many hotels the opportunity and the motives are there, even more so than in other industries. Many employees are at entry-level salaries, and as a result there can be an economic motive to supplement their incomes. The lodging industry needs to be sensitive to those issues.”

Sensitive, indeed.

“It’s a tough and touchy subject in the hotel business,” says Paul Limbert, general manager of the Park Hyatt in Washington, D.C. “A lot of people think that putting a safe in guest rooms diminishes the service you offer guests. I disagree.

“I think it isn’t nice to make the guest walk through the lobby and stick things into a public safe. We have safe deposit boxes, of course, but we think it’s better for guests to put things away safely in the privacy of their own rooms.”

The Ritz Carlton in Montreal has installed 240 safes in guest rooms. “They’ve been a great success,” says a spokesman. “In the year we’ve had them, we haven’t had a single theft.”

The 600-room Drake Hotel in New York has installed a safe in each of its 52 suites, and expects to invest another $200,000 in safes within the next six months.

“Soon,” says general manager Jacques Hamburger, “we will have them in every one of our rooms. We’re putting them in more for convenience than anything else. But we also think the room safes are the wave of the future. They eliminate long lines of guests waiting to get into the safe deposit boxes, and there’s no key to lose.”

Among all Westin hotels, 20% offer room safes, including the Plaza in New York and the Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

In Singapore the Holiday Inn Park View has installed special “credit card” safes in each of the hotel’s 320 rooms. The system is activated by each guest’s own credit card. A microchip reads and memorizes the card as it is inserted into the safe. That becomes the code for opening it.

Each time the guest wants to get into the safe, the same credit card must be inserted. (If a guest doesn’t have a credit card, the hotel will emboss one for the safe.)

Although the system is activated by using a credit card, the Holiday Inn offers it as a free service to guests.

When the Stanhope Hotel in New York was recently renovated, safes were installed in each of 117 rooms. The 12-by-11-inch units were placed inside guest closets.

“The guests still use the safe-deposit boxes downstairs,” reports the hotel’s general manager, Stefan Simkovics, “but they love the room safes. They use them for things people don’t normally put in a safe deposit box: passports, airplane tickets and cameras.”

There’s no charge for use of the Stanhope safes. But it can be argued that a number of hotels have become greedy. In order to amortize the purchase and installation costs of the safes, many hotels charge guests $2 to $4 a day to use them.

“Charging for this privilege is wrong,” says the Park Hyatt’s Limbert. “When you put a safe in a room, you’re saying to the guest that you don’t entirely trust the lock on the door, or your own staff.

“But then, to make them pay $3 or $4 a day for the extra ‘security’ which you should already be providing is almost criminal. It is illogical to charge for the safes. Why should we ask a guest to pay extra money for something we should already provide?”

Still, despite the statistics, not every hotel is a safe supporter.

“Hotel safes are an unnecessary nuisance,” says Jurg Tuscher, general manager of the Mandarin in Hong Kong. “We pride ourselves on our safe deposit boxes. And we have some secure areas large enough to hold fur coats. Space isn’t a problem.”

Forced to Open Safe?

Ironically, one reason why the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok doesn’t have room safes is because general manager Kurt Wachtveitl wants to protect guests. How’s that?

“If someone comes into your room and demands all your money and valuables,” he says, “and you have a safe, you’re going to be forced to open it. But the crook is much less likely to hurt you or get your money if he knows going in that it’s not in your room but in a well-protected central area controlled by the hotel.”

Other hotels don’t install safes because of what they consider that it says about the hotel.

“We just don’t feel it’s a personal service,” says Wolfgang Triebnig, general manager of the Park Hyatt in Chicago. “It’s also another piece of furniture that only serves to clog up the room. Besides, the safe doors are not self-closing. I’d hate to always leave my room thinking I might not have closed the door.”

“We are philosophically opposed to them,” says Wolfgang Hultner, general manager of the new Mandarin Hotel in San Francisco. “When we built the hotel we thought about installing them. But we pride ourselves on the security of our safe deposit boxes.”

The Mandarin not only has regular safe deposit boxes but oversize boxes to hold attache cases and double-locked secure closets to hold fur coats.

“We looked at the extra convenience of room safes for guests,” Hultner says, “and deduced that they might be more of a security problem than a convenience. If you’re a pro you can get into these safes. We much prefer to keep guest valuables in a secure supervised area.”

But that’s not the case in most resort areas. In places such as Palm Springs and Hawaii it’s hard to find a hotel that doesn’t have room safes.

It’s also hard to find a hotel that doesn’t charge for them. In Hawaii, for example, virtually every hotel except the Halekulani and the Mauna Lani charges for use of room safes.

“Once you start charging guests to use the safes,” says Pollard, “utilization goes down and the objective of guest safety is compromised. The guest perceives the charge as the hotel nickel-and-diming him.”

Use of Boxes Recommended

And so the guest often has a choice between the convenience and extra cost of a room safe or the free use of the hotel’s safe deposit boxes. For my money, and until these hotels stop charging for the use of safes, my advice is to make the extra effort and use the boxes downstairs.

Even if the room safes are free, there’s a compelling reason not to use them. It’s called liability.

“A safe in a guest room doesn’t legally take the place of a hotel’s safe deposit boxes,” says William Quinn, general manager of the Century Plaza, which offers room safes.

“It is a convenience, and we clearly state this to the guest in a written disclaimer on the safe. After all, since we have no idea what the guests are putting in the safes, we would have no way of knowing what could be taken out.”

There are some other problems with the room safes. In Honolulu, general manager Urs Aeby has installed safes in each guest room and suite at the Halekulani. And while there’s no charge for using the safes, there is a charge if you forget your combination. (It costs the hotel $75 per locksmith call to open the units.)

“We’ve had no theft problems since we put our safes in,” Aeby says, “but there is one recurring problem. Too many guests close their safes when they check out and we can’t get them reopened.”