How Safe Are Hotel Safes?

MSNBC: I don't know about you, but the first thing I do when I check into a hotel is conduct an obligatory spot-check for bedbugs, unpack my belongings and place my passport, extra money and other items of value in the hotel safe, which, by name alone should be the best place to keep my important treasures, right?

Wrong. According to a new video (below) by travel consultant, skyrangerpro, of Skyranger Productions, your hotel safe may not be as, well, safe, as you think it is.

In the video, we're faced with a common, ordinary hotel room safe. The subject demonstrates the proper way to lock it, entering his own generic password of 123456. The safe closes and is supposedly secure now that it is locked. When he enters the password correctly, it opens once again. So far, so good.

He explains how during a recent trip to Ontario, he had forgotten his password and upon asking the hotel staff for assistance, was surprised to find out the safe has a default password set up — just enter all zeros and the safe will open.

The interesting thing is that this trick could potentially work on just about any standard hotel room safe. At the end of the video, the presenter warns travelers to test out the all–zeros default password and come up with alternative hiding spots for your laptops, passports and other important belongings just in case.

Video:

Austrailian Travelers Surprised by Airport Body Scanners

Australian Business Traveller: A surprise trial of controversial 'millimetre wave' body scanners is taking place at Sydney International Airport from today until 19th August. The government says passengers will be given the option of standard screening or passing through the new scanner.

Federal Transport Minister Anthony Albanese said the technology was "perfectly safe" and was the first person through the scanner when it was switched on.

The millimetre-waves are about 10,000 times weaker than a mobile phone signal, and considered much safer than the backscatter x-ray scanners that are used at some US airports. There is not scientific consensus over the safety of the scanners, though. One study by Los Alamos National Labs argued that standards had only been established for radio frequency exposure up to 300 gigahertz, and millimetre wave scanners were above this range.

Even though the strength of the waves is extremely low, the close-to-terahertz radiation used by the scanners could damage DNA in cells.

This is the second time the scanners have been tested in Australian airports. They were previously trialled in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide airports in October/November 2008, with over 70,000 passengers volunteering to be "imaged" by the machines. The government did not say why it needed to re-test the machines following the initial trial.

What the scanners will show

The scanners detect metal and non-metal items under clothing, and then pin-points where the item is hidden using a generic human outline (above).

The government says the machines will not store any imagery of passengers (however, the US government also made this assurance, before saved passenger images were leaked to a tech blog by a whistleblower.)

Passengers not wanting to try the body scanner will proceed through standard screening procedures. Melbourne Airport will also hold a trial of the scanners, before they are progressively rolled out at Australia’s international airports.

The government gave no warning of the introduction of the millimetre wave scanners, and has instead been focusing on the introduction of backscatter x-ray scanners to be used only on incoming passengers suspected of concealing drugs internally.

Another type of scanner that emits no radiation at all, but simply senses emissions from the human body was recently tested at Sydney Airport.

JetBlue Adds Fast-Track Security Fee

Australian Business Traveller: Airlines have found yet another 'optional extra' to charge passengers for, but this one actually sounds like a smart deal -- especially for business travelers.

Domestic US airline JetBlue's "Even More Speed" option lets you buy your way into the premium fast-track security lines at over a dozen US airports.

It's currently offered as part of JetBlue's "Even More Space" bundle, which includes extra legroom at the front of the plane and exit row seats, early boarding -- and, most importantly for the carry-on luggage obsessed USA, first shot at the overhead bins for your ridiculously large wheeled suitcase. (JetBlue is one of the few US airlines that still lets you check your first piece of hold baggage for free.)

The package costs $10 for a short flight to $100 for the longest JetBlue flight, but indications are that the airline will offer "Even More Speed" on its own -- for Even More Fees, no doubt.

There's no reason why Qantas, Virgin Australia and Jetstar shouldn't offer a similar perk as a cost-extra.

Virgin Australia passengers already get fast-track security at the curbside Sydney lounge if they're very frequent flyers, members of the lounge access program, or willing to fork out $65 for a single pass access.

Get Ready for Airport Iris Scanners

The Atlantic: They were only recently upgraded, but airport security checkpoints are desperately in need of a fix. We know how people feel about the invasive body scanners that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is currently using to scan for harmful materials before flight. New technology discussed Tuesday at the annual meeting of the International Air Transport Association would get rid of those scanners -- and cut your average wait time down from 35 minutes to zero minutes. The Atlantic Wire's Adam Clark Estes has more information on the proposed change:

Kind of like the failed "puffer" bomb sniffer, the "Checkpoint of the Future" looks like an illuminated car wash with three portals. An iris scan matches you to a chip in your passport or identification card and also assigns a security-risk level that determines which of the three portals you'll enter--"known traveler," normal security, or enhanced security. Depending on your security level, a series of x-rays would then analyze your body and your luggage contents while you walk through a long tunnel. Travelers in the high-risk tunnel would be subject to a more aggressive, full-body scan that checks for for explosives and liquids.

It's a bit Orwellian, but airport security officials nevertheless seem excited. U.S. Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole attended the unveiling and announced plans to implement the new fast-track system within the next five years. "It's something that's long overdue," Pistole said at the conference. "We're not at the checkpoint of the future yet but we're working toward that. I think eventually we will see something similar." The TSA could use an upgrade as everybody clearly hates the invasive body scanners introduced last year. They hate them passionately.

TSA to Fire 30 Baggage Screeners at HNL

Pacific Business News: The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it plans to fire more than 30 of its employees working at Honolulu International Airport (HNL) and suspend an additional 12 workers following an investigation of alleged improper baggage screening.

The investigation, which began in late 2010, found that some checked baggage during one shift at an unspecified area of Honolulu International Airport was not screened properly, according to a TSA statement. The alleged misconduct affected a “limited number” of flights daily during the last few months of 2010, according to the statement. A number of the officers were put in nonsecurity-related positions earlier this year due to the investigation.

The federal security director and the assistant federal security director are included in the more than 30 employees in question. Stanford Miyamoto, who currently serves as deputy area director, has been named the acting federal security director, effective Friday. The employees are being notified and have approximately seven days to respond to the TSA’s decision. The employees do have the option to appeal the decision, according to TSA spokesman Nico Melendez.

The TSA said in the statement that it has taken steps to ensure that baggage is properly screened at Honolulu International Airport; National Deployment Force officers and management-level TSA staff are temporarily serving to supplement the current personnel at the airport.

Airport Security of the Future

Travel Mole: This is what airport security of the future is set to look like.

Unveiled at the IATA’s annual meeting in Singapore this week, the three-lane checks would funnel fliers through based on their perceived security risk.

The three lanes would be classed as “known traveller," "normal" and "enhanced" security.

After presenting a passport or another document with a biometric identifier, travellers would be assigned to a lane based on "a risk assessment conducted by the government before the passenger arrives at the airport".

New York Hotels Revisit Staff Protection

Reuters: Days after former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for the alleged sexual assault of a hotel maid in his luxury Sofitel hotel suite, the housekeeping staff at the nearby Sheraton New York was called to a meeting with hotel management. In the meeting -- recounted by Beverly Banton, a housekeeper at the Sheraton -- management told the staff that the hotel would not tolerate any misbehavior from its guests, and that they should report any inappropriate incidents.

That is a notable shift from past practice at some New York hotels, according to several hotel workers protesting on Monday outside the New York Supreme Court in lower Manhattan, where Strauss-Kahn was pleading not guilty to the charges against him that carry up to 25 years in prison.

Often, the workers said, complaints of inappropriate behavior by guests were swept under the rug. Banton said she was assaulted several years ago, when a guest grabbed her breast inside his hotel room. Security removed the guest from the hotel, but the police were not summoned, she said.

"In those days, they would say, 'The guests come first.' There's a lot of people this happened to who didn't say nothing. Now it's all out in the open. I hope this changes things -- it has to," Banton said.

The Sheraton did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to the meeting at the Sheraton, the Four Seasons held a refresher course on sexual harassment and reviewed its safety procedures in the last week, said Tiffani Cailor, a spokeswoman for the hotel. "Based on what has been happening, we just wanted to make sure that our staff feels safe and comfortable," she said.

PROPOSED LEGISLATION

Broader protections may be coming soon. The Hotel Association of New York is planning to meet with the hotel workers' union to discuss potential reforms, including improved training for security and other staff. The association is also meeting with state Assemblyman Rory Lancman, who has proposed legislation mandating panic buttons for housekeeping staff.

Since the May 14 Strauss-Kahn arrest, the Sofitel and the Pierre, another high-end hotel in midtown Manhattan, have both decided to give panic buttons to housekeepers. "The safety of our hotel workers continues to be of primary importance to all members," association spokeswoman Lisa Linden said. "There have been and will be discussions about the safety of our workers.

The maid who accused Strauss-Kahn of sexually attacking her has hired Kenneth Thompson, an experienced civil litigator, and could eventually file a civil lawsuit seeking damages. But it is doubtful that the Sofitel could be named as a defendant in such a suit, because the standard for finding a hotel liable for attacks on its staff is not easy to meet. Generally, injuries sustained while working are covered by workers' compensation laws, which ensure that employees are compensated in exchange for waiving their right to sue their employers.

New York state law allows employees to sue for additional compensation if they can prove their employer engaged in "gross negligence." But courts have held that gross negligence must include intentional misconduct on the part of the employer, and this is a high bar for a plaintiff to clear.

"In order to show gross negligence, you need to show that the employer participated in the assault," said labor attorney Philip Berkowitz, of Littler Mendelson. The standard would not be met in the case of an employee assaulted by a guest, even if the employee could show that the hotel's security procedures were flawed, Berkowitz said. Liability aside, there is little question that hotels would prefer to avoid any incidents that might harm their image.

"These hotels do not want this exposure," said Richard Roth, an attorney who has represented corporate and entertainment clients. "This case is getting hotels to reassess their policies, because they want to make sure it doesn't happen to them."

Hotel Confidential

Newsweek: Dominique Strauss-Kahn won’t go down in history as the next president of France, but he may well be remembered as the man who made the “hospitality industry” a lot less hospitable.

More than a few business travelers think of sex as a hotel amenity, like free shampoo or chocolates on the pillow, and before Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk on charges that he sexually assaulted a cleaning woman, most hotels looked the other way. Not anymore. After an Egyptian businessman was carted out of New York’s swanky Pierre hotel by the NYPD late last month for allegedly sexually assaulting a maid, the hotel said it will arm all its room attendants with panic buttons. The Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South is considering doing the same; already, general manager Scott Geraghty reports that at daily meetings management is “providing specific safety guidelines to all our housekeeping staff and reiterating the importance of remaining vigilant and reporting anything that may raise suspicions while on the job.” Meanwhile, the biggest union in the hospitality industry, UNITE, is calling for hotels to provide sexual-harassment training to all employees.

All of which has left business travelers a bit skittish as they try to figure out what constitutes acceptable behavior. Is it OK to let a room-service attendant set your breakfast table while the door is shut? Does booking an in-room massage raise suspicions from the concierge that you might be looking for something more? Is it even OK to chat up the attendant in the elevator? Maybe not, to hear a Regency Hotel employee in New York, who says male guests sometimes mistake her friendliness and smiles—which are job requirements—as flirtation.

If the questions are knotty, it’s because men have a tendency to be naughty when they travel. A new NEWSWEEK/Daily Beast Poll of 400 married men found that 21 percent admit to wanting to cheat on their spouse while traveling on business—and 8 percent have actually done so (the majority of them repeatedly). Six percent of the respondents admitted to having paid for sex while traveling on business. Still others acknowledged that they’ve hit on the help: 3 percent of the men in NEWSWEEK’s poll said they’d made a pass at a hotel worker (more than half were rebuffed), and 2 percent had sex with them. Even if they’re not having sex, many businessmen let it all hang out when they travel—to judge from the 12 percent of married men who indicated they’re not always fully dressed when they let staffers into their rooms. And about that massage? Eleven percent of the married men who’ve had one say that sexual contact was involved—though not a single respondent would cop to having initiated it.

Andria Babbington, who worked for 17 years as a hotel housekeeper and is now a union representative in Toronto, says she still remembers the first time it happened to her. At 18 years old and just 95 pounds, she was sent to a room to deliver a blanket, and arrived to find the guest completely naked, lying on top of the bed. “He asked me to touch his genital area, offered me money for it. I said, ‘No, my job doesn’t go that far.’ He spent a couple minutes trying to get me to come closer and tuck him in ... Eventually I just dropped the blanket on the edge of the bed and ran out.” Yet when Babbington informed her supervisors, she found little support. “They laughed,” she recalls. “Everyone thought it was funny, and the reason they thought it was funny was because this wasn’t the first time they’d heard it. It was a ‘welcome to the club’–type thing.”

Certainly, powerful men behaving badly at hotels is hardly a novelty. NBA superstar Kobe Bryant was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a 19-year-old hotel employee in Eagle, Colo., in 2003 (the case was settled out of court). In 2006 former vice president Al Gore was accused of groping and kissing a massage therapist at a hotel in Portland, Ore. And it was at a Ritz-Carlton that sports announcer Marv Albert attacked his mistress and forced her to have oral sex after she refused to have a three-way (he pleaded guilty).

The official word from hotel operators is that they don’t condone inappropriate behavior on their premises. But many business travelers know they can get almost any extracurricular activity they want without ever leaving the hotel. It starts with the helpful bellman who’s ready with strip-club recommendations, extends upstairs to the pay-per-view porn, and back down to the lobby where semipros work the bars with a wink and nod to management. Kristin Davis, the former madam of choice for Eliot Spitzer and the recently deceased composer Joseph Brooks, says that when she was fully operational she had staffers inside Manhattan’s Ritz-Carlton and Gansevoort working as middlemen for her (the Ritz-Carlton denied knowledge of the matter; the Gansevoort declined to comment). In Atlanta, one doorman who’s worked for nearly 25 years at a chic hotel says he’s developed a profitable side business charging $200 a pop to give hookers and female “groupies” the room numbers of NBA and NFL stars staying there (the players never seem to complain). “That’s the hotel business in a nutshell,” says the doorman, Anthony, who requested that his last name not be used. “They ignore a lot of things happening to their guests and to the workers.”

It’s easy to understand why. In an industry where the customer is always right, hotels can’t afford to be puritanical about their guests’ peccadilloes—especially those of the rich and powerful men who drop thousands of dollars a night on the presidential suite. And in an age when any guest with a grievance, legitimate or not, can broadcast a beef to millions of potential customers on websites like TripAdvisor and Travelocity, hotel managers bend over backward to keep the clients happy.

And so the customers’ desires can trump almost anything else—including safety and basic decency. One housekeeper who has spent a decade working at a Beverly Hills hotel where rooms cost up to $2,200 per night says her attempts to report repeated incidents of harassment have received little, if any, response. After a client grabbed her breasts, her supervisor told her to return to the room and finish cleaning. “I did as I was told,” she says. Yasmin Vasquez, a single mother who has worked in various hotels across the country, recalls how a colleague at a California hotel was sexually assaulted and reported the incident to management, only to be told she was lying. She’s pretty certain why the incident wasn’t taken seriously. “My friend had no papers, and the hotel knew she was illegal,” Vasquez says.

A longtime security supervisor for a major Las Vegas resort describes management’s approach to dealing with sexual harassment this way: “We are not police. We are not looking to call something a crime. Unless someone wants to press charges, we try not to call Metro.” That’s certainly the experience of Jack Tuckner, a Manhattan-based lawyer on the speed dial of several local women’s-rights organizations. “I know former law-enforcement people who work for the hotels who try to keep it in the family,” he says.

But now that the dirty laundry is getting aired, hotel managers and their customers are being forced to clean up their acts—at least for a while. Bo Dietl, TV personality and security consultant for the rich and famous, says he’s now advising clients to avoid any situation while traveling that might seem sexually inappropriate. “In this day and age, you gotta just watch everybody,” he says. If not for the media swarm following the alleged Strauss-Kahn attack, he says, “you think this Egyptian guy [at the Pierre] would’ve taken a hit like that? Not a shot in hell.”