+1 vote for "have never ever been charged for the in-room safe" camp.

Although technically one could argue the hotel factors in the safe cost into the room rate.

Maybe so, but a thief would have to be a committed individual, with the knowledge and/or tools to gain access to your room and open your safe.

Having your things lying all over the place would make it more scattered, but also accessible to many other people - housekeeping staff, room service, people walking by your room when the door's open and the maid's cleaning the washroom.

Add to this that many places legislate liability or augmented liability of you use the safe and the fact that # of suspects shrinks drastically if access was forced with an electronic device.

I wonder if a safe thief or a light fingered housekeeper have altered their actions due to the possibility of the hotel guest putting a hidden cam in the room to monitor things?

A few thoughts on this topic:

1) I have certainly seen surcharges on my bill for the in-room safe. These seem to be much less common today than a few years ago, though I'm not certain to what extent that's because industry practices have shifted versus changes in brands and locations of hotels I've typically stayed at.

2) In over 1,000 hotel nights in recent years I have never had anything stolen from my room despite rarely using in-room safes.

3) I believe housekeeping and other hotel staff are, by and large, honest. Moreover, I believe most those who might be tempted to steal realize that they would automatically be the first suspected in the event of a guest reporting a theft.

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.

checklist item to meet industry * rating

same thing as a shoe cleaning machine that ive never ever seen used. or an actual shoe polishing stand even in high end hotels that is rarely manned. (or womanned)

better word: staffed :p

Anything above a clean room with electricity and a tv would be considered a luxury in some of the 3rd world countries' smaller cities I have traveled. Some of these hotels will even charge you for towels as they have to wash them.

My biggest security concern is with replacement keys. In the last couple of years I've locked myself out of my room three times in various hotels when I went down for breakfast and forgot to take the room key. All three times I gave my name and room number to the front desk and they gave me a replacement key immediately without asking for any identification, or assigning and escort to make sure that I'm actually who I said I am.

When this happens, report it to the GM and/or the hotel chain. Similarly, you should never permit an employee to announce your room number aloud. If this happens, you might want to change rooms (or change the hotel).

Now I always request 2 keys, one I keep in my wallet and the other in a different pocket...so if I leave a key in my room, I have the other key as a back-up.:)

Maybe, though I've never had to opt-OUT of paying for wifi...only opt-in.

Interesting. I've never chosen a Super 8 or a Days Inn based on its * rating but I guess they have to think about how they are listed on online travel portals. I'm not convinced the presence or absence of an in-room safe would really make a difference with the star rating but I don't actually know how that works, TBH.

I've skimmed through AAA's checklist of requirements for each diamond level. Numerous additional items are required at each level above the previous. Most of them are nit-picky things that few travelers use or care about most of the time. I certainly don't walk into a hotel room and say, "Ooh, look, an in-room safe! I've really moved up in the world."

I checked into a property in Myrtle Beach a couple of years ago that had an electronic safe on a shelf in a closet. The safe appeared to have been attached to the wall at one point but now was just loose. I asked for another room and it was the same there. I ended up hiding some cash that I needed for a golf outing in a Murphy bed for a couple of nights. Have since found a different property to stay at that has more secure safes. I agree that they only serve to keep honest people honest.

I think it's less that and more to avoid someone thinking: "You'd think that a 4-Diamond hotel should have an in-room safe".

I once worked in a hotel that attempted to move from 4-Diamond to 5-Diamond. I agree that some of the requirements were rather silly. The one I remember as being ridiculous was crown moulding. I can't recall if that was a 4-Diamond or 5-Diamond requirement. To this day, whenever I walk into a hotel room, I always look up and check.

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.

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.

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.