So how do you fortify your hotel to ensure all valuables stay as long as your guests?
Safety in numbers
Room safes are the centrepiece of your hotel valuables security. Sadly they're often anything but safe and they can be easy targets for experienced thieves. If your rooms are fitted with safes, your guests are entitled to think they are indeed 'safe' so here are a few ways to make sure they are. Stick to combination safes - keys and cards are easy to copy. However there is still the small matter of size and hotel safes are conveniently portable. Bolt them to the floor from the inside, preferably in a crowbar-unfriendly wardrobe.
Check-in for valuables
Seriously expensive items should never be stored in a room safe just to be on the safe side, so make valuables discussions a standard part of check-in. Train all reception staff to ask guests if they are carrying anything genuinely pricey or precious. If so suggest they hand them in so they can be stored with a higher degree of impregnability in the hotel safe.
Ground undesirables
If room access is via lifts, you can keep unsupervised non-guests on the ground by requiring key card access to all floors. While this may create a little inconvenience – hotel guests have to come down before visitors can go up – less undesirable characters will get where they want to go.
A policy of vigilance
Any hotel, no matter how many stars it has, is a target for thieves. By nature hotels attract travellers with handily packaged bags of cash, credit cards and passports; bags that can be whisked away in a single distracted moment. Acknowledge this unfortunate fact; it doesn't reflect badly on your hotel to do so. If your guests adopt a more cautious, vigilant approach while dining or drinking in your hotel, they'll play their part in maintaining a proud safety record.