I’ll be the first to admit that I have some weird quirks when it comes to hotel room safety. For example, every time I enter my room I check under the bed and in the closets.
But then there are other areas where I’m perhaps not worried enough. For example, as I’ve written about in the past, I generally don’t use hotel safes. There are some exceptions, like if it’s a city where theft is especially common. However, a vast majority of the time I’m happy just leaving my stuff lying around, even when I’m not there.
I’m not usually concerned about housekeeping taking anything. They do many rooms per day and I tend to think they’re pretty honest, because their jobs would be in jeopardy if there were theft claims that could be traced to them. To be clear, if I had real valuables like expensive jewelry or something, I’d absolutely put them in a safe. But for a hundred bucks in cash and some basic electronics, I’m not as worried.
Right now I’m in the UAE, where I feel especially comfortable not using a safe. The UAE is quite safe, especially since most of the workforce is from outside the country, so they wouldn’t want to do anything that gets them fired and deported. There’s very little petty crime in the UAE.
I’m staying at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, and earlier I left my room for a while so that housekeeping could service it.
I returned to my room and put on the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and to my surprise there was a knock at the door. Hmmm, that’s unusual. It was the butler. It’s even more unusual that they wouldn’t obey the sign.
“Sorry to disturb you Mr. Benjamin, but could you please make sure to use the in-room safe in the future? Earlier when your room was cleaned you left money lying around, so we had to call security and go through a process. This is a very big safety issue for us. Please make sure you use the safe in the future.”
Well, I can’t say I’ve ever had that happen before. I appreciate the general concern, though I didn’t realize some hotels actually call security if you leave money in the room.
Has anyone experienced something like this before?
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