Most in-room safes I've seen are more like lock-boxes. They're fins for keeping small items like cash, spare credit cards, camera lenses, and sometimes tablets.
Originally Posted by
theddo
Well, no. If you put everything in a safe and the thief knows where the safe is and how to access it in 1 min it would arguably be better to not put your valuables in it.
Well, there's the crux - how long would it take the average hotel thief to access an in-room safe? I would imagine that the time would vary greatly depending on the type of safe; electronics that have manufacturer's master codes built in could be opened in a few seconds, while an old-fashioned safe with a metal key would take longer, unless the thief had obtained a master key of some type.
The object of an in-room safe is not to be impenetrable. The object is to delay and impede a thief's access to your items long enough to cause him to move on to another, softer, target.
Originally Posted by
beachmouse
It's the propped doors that are a noteworthy security concern for me, not the honesty of the housekeeping staff. So many times you can go down the hall of a hotel, the door is fully open for ease in cleaning, someone's stuff is visible all over the place, but the housekeeper is not within sight for whatever reason.
And I'm in the camp that says that you can reduce petty crime by 80-90% by simply making it slightly harder for any potential criminals who know that if it takes more than a few seconds, it's not worth it. So anything of significant either gets buried in a closed suitcase or put into the safe when I'm not in the room.
Those propped doors have always been a concern to me, as well. They serve multiple purposes - to prevent the housekeeper from needing to use their key multiple times while working a single room, to prevent the room from being a totally private place while a housekeeper is working in it, and to improve ventilation while the housekeeper uses smelly cleaners. While a housekeeper is actually in the room, the propped open door is far less of a theft risk than when they work on two or three rooms at once and prop them all open - your door might be propped open while the HK is in the room next door, allowing thieves to slip into your room quietly and make off with any loose items. It's in this scenario that hotel safes are most useful, because the thief is in a hurry and has time to only grab loose items and search one or two common places like under the mattress or inside the suitcase.
This is why I don't close or lock my suitcase - if it's unlocked and open, it obviously contains nothing worth stealing, while if it's locked, it must contain valuables, so all the thief needs to do is pick it up and walk out. He can open it later at his leisure and take as much time as is needed.
So anything significant of mine gets put in the safe, or in the case of my laptop, locked with a steel cable to an item fixed to the room, like a shelf or drain pipe. Not a 100% guarantee, obviously, but just enough of an impediment to cause a thief to move onto the next room, where someone has thoughtfully left their laptop and its charging cable sitting out on the desk within easy reach.