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If you’re traveling for a few days, or even going on a longer vacation, you’ll likely stay in a hotel or at a resort, and want a place to be able to leave your important documents and items of value when you’re away from your room. In the majority of instances, hotels provide guests with safes inside their rooms, and while you might think this to be the ideal location for storing such items, are they as ‘safe’ as they at first seem?

Consider external access

Hotel safes are technically the property of the hotel, and as a guest, you have no control over restricting who has access to it. With so many people able to access the safe inside your hotel room, is it as safe as you might think?

Think about how up-to-date the safe is

The majority of safes kept inside guests rooms have electronic locks in which the combination can easily be reset, and while these are usually very effective as a method of security, a lot will depend upon whether the technology within the safe has been upgraded recently. To update and upgrade every hotel safe is a costly enterprise for hotels, especially those with hundreds of rooms, meaning that their guest safes are often many years old, and may not be as effective at keeping items secure as newer, more modern models.

Regular maintenance of the safes in guests rooms is also likely to be compromised in hotels, and they may not be working as they should – something you’d be unlikely to know about until you used it.

Can your hotel room safe be breached?

Without a key to open them, hotel safes can be ‘bounced’ by a burglar (who may well be an employee or other guest who has managed to gain access to your room while you’re away from it), and while it’s a method that takes some practise, many burglars have perfected it over the years. Electronic safes may also be opened with the use of tools that can easily be purchased online or in a shop.

Could it be safer to store your items in a less obvious location?

Hotel safes are typically found in the closet or underneath the television set, and burglars know this. Oftentimes, while you might assume that locking items away is a safer option, it can actually be more effective to hide them somewhere that a burglar would be less likely to look.

Home safes are a whole different kettle of fish, and when professionally installed and maintained appropriately, they are fantastic places for storing items of value. Hotel safes on the other hand, well, we’ll let you be the judge of just how secure they are.