You can never be completely free of concern when you’re staying in a hotel or motel, but here are some ways that expert readers who travel all the time have recommended for keeping things safe:
1. Don’t leave a key in your room. A housekeeper could come in, swipe your key, then come back later and steal from you.
2. Make sure the door latches when you leave. There’s an entire class of thieves who just walk up and down corridors, trying doors to see if they’re properly latched.
3. Buy a rubber doorstop. Stick it under your door when you go to bed and it will prevent the housekeeper — or anyone else — from coming in before you get up.
4. Make sure your hotel safe doesn’t open to simple number combinations like 0000. Some hotels deliberately program codes like that into their safes so employees can open when guests forget their codes. Guess when else hotel employees can open them? When you’re not around. And make sure the safe is bolted down, or else someone can simply walk off with it.
5. Buy an inexpensive laptop tether — the kind that can’t be cut with a knife — and attach your laptop to a sturdy object in your room. Laptops are among the most stolen items, and likely the one you’ll miss the most. If you don’t want to buy a tether, at least make it harder to steal by putting it in your suitcase, zipping it up and putting it out of sight.
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