In-room safes gain favor

As more guests bring their expensive electronic gadgets along during their stay, hoteliers are beginning to install larger safes to keep their guests feeling safe and their property secure. For hotels without an existing guestroom safe, an upgrade is almost certainly a necessity.

“We didn’t have any safes before and we had a lot of international guests who were accustomed to safes, which prompted us to look into it,” said Barbara Hubbard, assistant GM at the Holiday Inn Arlington (Va.). “At the [InterContinental Hotels Group] conference we visited booths to look at measurements and what we could put in the room to narrow down vendors that were useful for us. The ease of installation was important with Safemark, because we needed to keep rooms unoccupied to speed up the rate of installing the safes.”

The Holiday Inn Arlington selected Safemark’s EN 5.3 safe, which can hold a 17-inch laptop along with other guest items.

“We’re 221 rooms, and the safe has a handheld device that reads the safes kind of like locks on guestroom doors,” Hubbard said. “From start to finish it was probably four to five months. The installation itself went quickly; it was less then a week followed by training with employees. We have a specific number of people who are authorized to open the safes. You want to ensure there is always someone on property who can open a safe for a guest, depending on the situation.”

With capital dollars still limited, many hotels with outdated safe systems are taking a piecemeal approach to upgrading their guestroom safes.

“We just put 20 new Safemark safes onto our property, which has approximately 800 rooms,” said Larry Tashman, director of loss prevention at the La Quinta Resort and Spa in La Quinta, Calif. “We are transitioning over to the Safemarks as replacement becomes necessary or during a possible upcoming renovation. We do have brand standards, and Safemark safes actually exceed the standard for size and security devices.”

New electronic safes offer a bevy of security features that increase efficiency for engineers and while reducing the possibility of fraud or theft.

“Technology is the key word, because [Safemark’s] handheld unit is very user friendly,” said Larry Tashman, director of loss prevention at the La Quinta Resort and Spa in La Quinta, Calif. ”This safe can do things you can’t with other industry options. You can interrogate a safe to see when a guest has opened it with their private code, and you can also do the same for when an employee has used the handheld unit to open the safe. There’s accountability on both sides of the coin, which we don’t have with the safes we’re currently using. It provides better protection for our guests, and better accountability for myself as a safety and security professional.”