Do you trust the safes in your hotel rooms?
 

i want to store some valuables plus my passport but i always use the hotel front desk safe rather than the flimsy ones in my room.

are they actually safe?

Obviously I have no genuine data on this, but, in my own experience, they've been completely safe. I use them everytime I travel and have never had an issue. Then again, other than my passport, I rarely travel with anything really valuable (large amounts of currency, jewelry). If I did, I'd be more inclined to use the front desk option.

+1, Spot on assessment.

For the most part I do use the safes if provided.

What a great topic for my first post ...

The short answer is: No, don't trust these safes at all.

Some details: This is my personal experience, however I have heard many similar stories. We were renting an apartment while on vacation on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands (Spain) a couple of years back which belonged to a bigger hotel (with a good reputation). They had a safe in the apartment which was more solid than the standard hotel safes, and which we needed to pay for (as they even provided insurance). One night, upon returning to the apartment after dinner, we have found the apartment in complete chaos: A broken window, and all that was missing were a suitcase and ... the safe! The chaos was due to the thieves emptying the suitcase to transport the safe away, nothing else was missing. Please note that this safe was even attached to the wall (which is not the case for many hotel safes).

Overall, it is not hard to remove those safes and take them away. This happens to many people. Obviously, they do provide some degree of protection against occasional theft from hotel personnel, but that's all they do. I would argue that in most cases locking your valuables in your luggage does provide almost equal protection ...

A much better option is if the hotel offers to store valuables at the reception (or in a separate room with multiple safes).

As for those trying to argue this is a rare event, this happened to many people in surrounding hotels (this is nothing the hotel management nor the local police was ready to admit, but we had word from some helpful hotel employees), and in fact, upon reporting my stolen passport to the Swiss police, the one policeman I talked to had the same experience on the Canary islands.

Be aware.

Anything of serious value is not kept in the room. The rest goes in the hotel safe and never had a problem anywhere !

The safest place for your passport is in the night stand drawer under the phone book. No thief will ever look there.

Safes protect against employee theft, but not against outside thieves. In fact, I would argue that the safe is actually less safe than the rest of the room when outside thieves are concerned, because that is the first place they go to.

But I have stayed at dozens of hotels, motels, inns, hostels, campgrounds, and other accommodations, and have never had anything stolen.

Great question by the OP!

Any safe that is not nailed to the floor can be stolen. People will think there is something of value in it. It is a safe. Even a safe in your home, if not connected securely to something, can be stolen if someone wants it. I always check the room safe first to see if I can move it. If so, no safer then leaving stuff on the nightstand.

I guess this is the lesson that I learned. Even though, in fact, that one was nailed to the wall, but was only supported by a shelf. It was enough to remove the shelf under the safe and apply sufficient vertical force to the safe. Just left a big hole in the wall and some traces of blood of the thieves, who obviously had a hard time taking it out.

Don't most hotels do a quite negligent job in installing safes? I have rarely seen something solid ...

I believe that your experience is more the exception, not the norm. What happened to your safe is rare and that could happen anywhere at anytime. In my experience, these hotel safe's are safe. I've never had a problem with them but as the PP said, if it's not secured to a wall or to something it's not as secure as it could be. Bottom line, never leave all of your valuables in one place whether it be a safe or a suitcase.

No, I do not trust them. If the hotel gets a proper safe and properly mounts it, that's a totally different story, but I've seen too many that don't fit that description.

Some examples:

Safes not attached to the floor or mounted in the wall, just sitting there to be grabbed.

Safes mounted to the floor with sheet rock screws, which are quite brittle and easily snapped with a prybar or hammer blow

My favorite was a safe that was mounted to the closet, but to the removable shelve in the closet, the mounting was more to keep the safe from falling than to keep it secure.


On a recent trip to Belize, at the hotel we were staying at, they had a floor mounted key operated safe. The key was on your hotel door keychain, and for the first time ever, that was the hotel key I lost someplace.

It was the night before we were to leave, and our passports were in the safe, and the front desk was closed for the night. After a bit of trial and error, I found the entire lock mechanism could be removed from this very widely available home safe with a butterknife. Take out our stuff, clean up the dust, put it back together, and it's ready for the next person to use once they make another key.

I'm not saying they are all like that, but it was actually quite shocking to see how easy it was.

To be fair, while the product is sold as a home safe, it's marketed way more as a way to protect your documents in a fire, something I'm sure it does much better than to keep them from thieves.

That is FT lingo when one wants to say the OP's post is bad! Not kidding!

I generally put non-valuables in the safe! :D

I trust it with caution. I do my best to leave valuables at home.

Wow.. I trusted them until just now. I didn't think about someone taking the safe with them.. but I would hope they wouldn't be able to get far without someone stopping them.