At check-out time, you call a bellman to collect your luggage. You pay your bill, then tip your bellman for loading your bags into a taxi. Did you count your bags? Bellmen at Las Vegas hotels tell me that suitcases are frequently left behind, even when guests are asked to check and sign a luggage release form. Bellmen don’t know whose bags are whose. And, cabbies often drive to the airport with bags that don’t belong to their passengers.

“What happens then?” I asked Ed, a bellman at Mandalay Bay. “Some cabs will bring them back to us. Some leave them at the airport but give us a call and tell us. Others just leave them. Then we have to trace them.”

Hotel luggage storage

Most hotels offer some sort of bag storage for guests. Say check-out is noon and your flight is not until night, or you visit Las Vegas and want to take an overnight bus trip to the Grand Canyon and leave your club-wear behind. Bob and I frequently take advantage of hotel luggage storage, but only after examining the facility.

A large hotel may have a dedicated room with limited access, possibly kept locked, possibly dispensing luggage tags. This is common in, say, Nairobi, where guests headquarter themselves, then take off on safari with light duffel-bags. In small hotels in Venice, in Istanbul, and in Westport, Connecticut, for example, we’ve left bags in the hotel manager’s office, behind his desk.

In Athens recently, the storage option we were offered was out of the question; we opted to rearrange our plans, instead. A motley heap of suitcases were piled in the lobby, with nothing but the desk clerk’s “eye on them.” We’ve passed on adding our bags to rows of others with rope through their handles, and messy mountains of luggage with netting tossed over them.

Group travelers arriving early, before rooms are available, are urged by their tour leaders to leave their bags and go out. We’re so often amazed at the unclaimed masses of miscellaneous suitcases in hotel lobbies, extracted from the underbellies of tour buses and left unguarded. Just who is responsible? A young dancer in a show we worked in lost her laptop this way. “Just leave your bag there,” she was told on arrival, after flying into Stockholm from New York. When she found her emptied backpack she got plenty of sympathy, but the nebulous question of accountability was never answered.

Judging the safety of hotel bag storage, whether it’s a locked room behind the front desk or organized chaos spread across the lobby floor, means making a personal decision based on your own comfort level. What’s in your luggage? Dirty clothes, or expensive electronic equipment? What kind of luggage is it? Hard-shell with generic locks? Soft-sided with zippers? What about lobby traffic, and how many employees exist to oversee the situation? Like most personal safety issues, only you can weigh potential risks against your particular circumstance. The idea is to make an informed decision, not allow happenstance. At some time or other, you’re bound to make compromises, but with evaluation, you cut your losses.

Excerpt from Travel Advisory: How to Avoid Thefts, Cons, and Street Scams
Chapter Three: Hotels: Have a Nice Stay