Today we’ve got a self defense article that’s useful whether you carry a gun or not: 5 hotel safety tips. Sure, in these Coronatimes people aren’t traveling much, but this too will pass, and we’ll be back out on the road before we know it. But when you’re in a hotel, which is the definition of an unsecured location, how can you protect yourself?
1. Don’t stay in cheap hotels in bad areas
Our first of 5 Hotel Safety Tips should be a no-brainer, buuuuuuuuuuuuuut people are cheap sometimes and like to save money. This seems like a good idea until you’re staying in a flophouse watching a guy shoot smack into his veins out your window. Rule of thumb: don’t stay in hotels where your room’s door opens up the outside world. Sure it looks cool when Raylan Givens does it, but think about all the bad things that happened to him. My recommendation: don’t stay in any hotel that isn’t at least as nice as a Hampton Inn or a Holiday Inn Express. Those types of major chains have corporate controls on where they’re allowed to be, and generally aren’t in bad parts of town.
2. Use your Do Not Disturb sign
This might actually be the most powerful of our 5 Hotel Safety Tips. Use your room’s DND sign. Having been a Housekeeping manager for a couple of properties, I can tell you that 99.9% of housekeepers will see that sign on your door and think “sweet I don’t have to clean this room” and move on. It adheres to the gray man principle of not drawing attention to yourself.
3. Lock your valuables (your gun) in your suitcase when you’re not in the room
The biggest concern when you’re in a hotel is preventing casual access/theft, right? Lock your nice items in a suitcase. I also then put my locked suitcase in the closet, but that’s not entirely necessary. The idea here is to not leave anything worth stealing in plain view. Plus, since your DND is up already because of Rule 2 of our 5 Hotel Safety Tips, if someone comes into the room and you find your items disturbed, you can immediately start the process of filing a police report, which greatly increases the chances of getting your stuff back.
4. LOCK YOUR DOORS
Seriously, #4 of the 5 Hotel Safety Tips is the most obvious. When you’re in your room, double lock your door. Use the deadbolt and the latch. This does two things: makes the door much harder to force entry on, and tells housekeeping that you don’t want to be bothered. A modern key card access door that all nice hotels have can only be opened by the God-key when it’s bolted. Hotels will only use the God-key in dire situations.
5. Don’t tag your location on social media.
Last on our list of 5 Hotel Safety Tips is another obvious one. Don’t geo-tag your location on social media. Especially if you want to take a cool “here’s my gun and knife and Rolex on the nightstand” photo, then tag yourself at Bob’s Crack Den and Pimp Shack Motel. This makes you a target, and we want to avoid that, right?
Most of these tips are common sense, or at least I would think they’re common sense. But when used together, they create a solid “gray man” barrier around you and your valuable items. By reducing the avenues that you could be targeted for crime, you increase your safety without making it obvious that you’re increasing your safety.
