What would you do if you opened the safe behind the hotel manager’s desk and found your passports gone? One woman took creative action.
Mary from Michigan and her two adult children just quit their jobs and sold or stored everything. They’re taking a year to travel the world. Oh, what a plan!
After seeing our show, Mary told us about her recent visit to Laos. She and her son and daughter stored their stuff in Bangkok and took a boat down the Mekong to Laos. There, Mary put her few valuables into the hotel lobby safe: the family’s three passports bundled with $2,000 folded into an envelope, and some very large camera lenses.
When she went to retrieve her things, only the lenses remained. Mary quickly discovered that one key opened all twenty safe deposit boxes, and her interrogation of the hotel manager led her to suspect an employee (rather than a guest).
Mary channeled her fear and anger and made a plan. She and her kids fanned out among the alleys surrounding the hotel and shouted into the darkness with volume and authority. “I’ll pay $200 for the stolen passports!” Within half an hour, Mary was lightly tapped on her shoulder, the passports, still bundled, proffered.
And Mary paid up. She told me that people think she was crazy to pay, but she’d promised. The thieves hadn’t discovered the $2,000.
On the wall under the shower head, three feet above the floor, this pipe drained water after every shower. Not one of the nicer rooms we’ve stayed in, so I won’t name the place.
A reader of this blog recently wrote to me and described a suspicious encounter:
In Dublin, I noticed a tall young man in a green sweater keeping pace behind us, regardless of our window shopping. I turned down a busy side street, and he turned with us. We turned back to our original route, and the fellow with the green sweater appeared to be gone. Then I noticed that the same man was again following us, with the sweater rolled up and behind is back. I suddenly turned and said, “Good morning. How’s your day going so far?” The fellow said “Fine,” and then turned and walked off.
—Vern (and Pattie) Leming
I like the way Vern confronted his green sweater suspect. What he did is actually what many police and security officers do. It’s called aggressive hospitality: a friendly encounter meant to indicate “I see you, I’m watching.”
At a street festival, for example, police want to prevent incidents. When they spot a known suspect lurking, or an unknown person exhibiting suspicious behavior, they may confront the person with a friendly question: “Enjoying the festival?” or “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” A security guard at a theme park or in a mall will do the same. “Have you lost someone?”
Walmart practices the same principle to stem shoplifting. Called the “10-foot rule” there, store employees greet every customer who comes near them. If employees suspect shoplifting in progress, they offer to help the customer with his shopping.
Hotels and resorts also engage in aggressive hospitality. While guests notice a friendly staff greeting them at every turn, thieves, rogues, and transgressors lose their anonymity and feel watched.
Richard Buske, Security Manager of Nordic Hotels, takes this philosophy a step further. All staff members at his hotels are trained in security matters. All are taught to be observant and are praised for alerting management to suspicious behavior. Security is considered a team effort to be conducted in a friendly, positive manner.
We had a large and beautiful room at the Corinthia Lisboa Hotel in Lisbon. The business hotel’s casual restaurant, Tipico, is excellent, and features a highly-polished version of Portugal’s mosaic sidewalks on the floor. Our room contained every convenience.
Display at a tourism safety and security conference.
Bed bugs, we read, are living in hotels everywhere, dining on us. As a frequent hotel guest (200+ days a year for 16 years) I’m surprised that I’ve never noticed them. Mosquitos are attracted to me and I react badly to their bites. But bed bugs—I haven’t run into. Or maybe I repel them.
Kill bed bugs with heat
A large display at the recent California Tourism Safety and Security Conference caught my eye. The company provides a bed bug-baking service for any size space. Four hours at 130° does it, they say. Maybe less. Confidentially. So your neighbors (or other hotel guests) don’t know you’ve got bed bugs.
Ick.
Loot ‘n scoot: Through my police friends, I learned of another devious M.O. resulting in theft from hotel rooms. The thief simply poses as a guest. Wearing pool attire, she enters a hotel room that has a housekeeping cart at the door, as if she’s just returning to her own room from the pool. She tells the maid that she forgot her key, starts looking for it, and dismisses the maid. I suppose her beach bag is big enough for all the goodies she grabs, and she scoots out in her swimsuit looking as innocent as can be.
Maid left hotel room open and empty.
In another version, a female thief gets a nearby housekeeper to open a hotel room door because she’s carrying a heavy load. She may or may not have spotters on the lookout for guests returning to that floor.
Hotel security
In both cases, the security of our belongings is in the hands of the maids. How well are they trained? How much discretion do they have? When should they break the rules in order to be nice? When should they bend the rules in anticipation of a nice gratuity? What about temporary workers during the hotel’s high season—do they receive as thorough training? How many of us have approached our room only to find that we forgot our key, or the key doesn’t work, and a nice service staff member volunteers to let us in?
Hotel policy is one thing; compliance is another. How do you react when you find that your key doesn’t work (for the third time), the front desk is far away (giant hotel), your feet hurt and your arms are full and you’re dead tired, and the maid with a master key says “I’m sorry. It’s for your own security.”?
The burglars described in the recent police bulletins were females of average height and weight, 50ish and blonde. Nicely generic. The maid may believe she’s seen the impostor; and perhaps she has. Should she risk offending the “guest”?
Perhaps the maid should be required to ask the name of the guest and match it to a list. Yeah, a list on a clipboard left on the cart, that the thief’s accomplice copped a glance at. Perhaps the maid should be required to snap a photo of the guest “for your security.”
As a very frequent hotel guest, I have many times returned to my room to find the door left open by housekeeping staff “just for a minute” while they run to do something else. This always infuriates me, as there’s usually a laptop or two left out, as in the photo here, not to mention other valuables. But this is simply housekeeping error, and with proper training, can be corrected. The impostors described above are skilled social engineers, harder to protect against.
Bruce Schneier is currently blogging from SHB09, the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, at MIT. I doubt if discussions covered “tricking hotel maids,” but what a complicated and interesting subject. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall there. Instead, I can read articles by the presenters.
From town, several glaciers are visible in the Kenai Mountains.
A travel snafu brought us to Homer, Alaska, where the best joint in town is the Bidarka Inn. Population 5,454; minus children, that would just about make up one audience for us. We generally enjoy these unexpected opportunities to explore places off the beaten track. As long as the unplanned stops don’t impact a commitment.
After a nippy walk back from lunch in town (the Cosmic Kitchen, good), a hot shower was in order. The shower was a hideous, putty-colored, fiberglass unit complete with one of those ingenious curved curtain rods. Amazing what an improvement the curtain material made, though. The top quarter of the fabric, from my shoulder level up, was sheer mesh, allowing me to see out the bathroom door and out the window, to watch the activities at the skateboard park in the foreground, Kachemak Bay behind it, the snowcapped Kenai Mountains, and the Grewingk, Portlock, and Dixon Glaciers just beyond the bay. The distant view is spectacular in person. Much wider and closer than my photo appears.
Such small details, like a clever shower curtain, improve life on the road. My shower, even in the hideous, putty-colored, fiberglass unit, was pleasant. I probably used too much water.
Should Have Left it in the Hotel—Gisela and Ludvig Horst checked into their Barcelona hotel and immediately got into an argument. Gisela did not feel comfortable leaving their valuables in the room, though Ludvig was insistent that they should. They’d just arrived from Germany for an Herbalife convention. With 30,000 international participants in town, each sporting big I-heart-Herbalife buttons, every Barcelona hotel was fully booked. The Horsts ended up in the same small, semi-seedy inn Bob and I had chosen for our semi-seedy research. We met them at breakfast the morning after.
Thinking back, Gisela remembered a middle-aged man seated alone at a table behind them. Was it him? She also sensed the bulk of a man moving behind her and had assumed it was a waiter. Without warning, her bag was snatched right off her lap.
The Horsts lost everything. Besides the tremendous paperwork hassle, the mood of their trip was ruined and Gisela was badly traumatized. She blamed herself and lost confidence in her judgment, though she was hardly at fault.
Personal security is an art, not a science. Information and awareness are everything. In the Horsts’ situation, I may have done exactly as Gisela did, had I been lacking a suitable suitcase to use as a safe. However, I’d try to split up my goodies, and put as much as possible on my body instead of in a grabbable bag.
Coogee Beach, Australia—From our hotel, we walk around the corner to The Globe for “brekkie” every morning. We’re regulars on the stools at the open windows. We order a “tall black” and a “flat white.” Coffee. The Globe serves toasted fruit loaf, slices of a dense loaf packed with dried apricots, figs, dates, currents, and raisons. They toast it properly: dark so it’s as black as its poppy seed crust.
Earlier, I had seen a fruit loaf in a tiny market just across the street; the poster advertising it made me drool. It was called Dallas Fruit Loaf. I asked The Globe’s waitress if their fruit loaf was Dallas. She didn’t know. Anyway, it’s delicious.
One day they didn’t have the fruit loaf. I ordered the “full brekkie,” which Bob gets, and I was sorry. Next day, The Globe was still out of fruit loaf. “But I found out, it is Dallas,” the waitress said. “If I go and buy a loaf, will you toast it for me?” I asked her. “With pleasure,” she said.
So I ran across to the little market and bought a Dallas fruit loaf. The Globe’s waitress toasted three thick slices for me and served it on a plate with a crock of butter. I took the rest of the loaf back to the hotel.
Dallas-fruit-loaf
But how will we toast it, Bob and I wondered. It’s soooo delicious toasted! I thought about what we had in the room. We can steam it with our clothes steamer to make it damp, then let it dry out and get hard on the outside. Then we can heat water in the coffee pot and set a cup of hot water on the toast to warm it. No. We can put a slice in the trouser press! Set the timer for 30 minutes… slow, but it might work. What if we forget the bread in the trouser press, Bob wondered. Okay, never mind.
Later, Bob went out for a take-away Thai lunch. I stayed on our balcony and ate an apple. And a slice of Dallas fruit loaf. Toasted.
Yes—I remembered what else we had in our room. An iron!
Why not? It’s teflon coated. I tried just a corner first. The iron wiped clean on a towel. Who needs butter?
The glass window opens wide and has shutters folded on the other side.
To wash, but not to dream…
A full-length, fully-opening glass window in the marble shower allows me an expansive view while washing. I can see the bedroom, the tv, the husband, the balcony, palm trees, the ocean, the sailboats…and the room service man picking up our breakfast tray.
