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Shipboard Safecracker Raises Security Questions
The Travel Critic · May 3, 2000

How safe is the safe in your room? Not very, to hear Esther Peck talk about it.

On a recent trip with her husband through the Panama Canal on Norwegian Cruise Line's Majesty, she returned to her cabin to find a handwritten note from a security officer pinned to the dresser. "I have had to open your safe," it read. "The combination has been re-set. Please contact reception for number."

Peck couldn't believe it. She tracked down the officer and asked him why he'd entered her room without first asking for permission. "I was told that the previous occupant left $350 in a sock in the safe. They had to check to see if it was there," she says.

But what angered Peck more than the incident itself was the cavalier attitude with which she says the cruise line treated her complaint. After her travel agent inquired about the episode and Peck wrote a letter of protest to the company, Norwegian sent her a form response offering a modest discount on a future trip.

"I'll never touch a safe again," says Peck. "And I'll never take another Norwegian cruise."

The event, Norwegian admits, is "very irregular."

"This is the first time I've ever heard of something like this happening," says Stacy Moyer, a spokeswoman for the cruise line. Although Norwegian doesn't have any formal guidelines regarding access to a guest's safe, she says the security officer should have contacted Peck before entering her cabin and opening the vault.

"Occasionally, when there's a reason to believe there's illegal activity going on in the room, we'll go in without asking," she adds. "But that obviously wasn't the case this time."

The story makes someone like Moshe Cohen cringe. A vice president at Minibar Systems Inc., in Rockville, Maryland, he says the security officer was out of line. The safes his company delivers to hotels and cruise lines, he adds, offer a variety of protocols designed to prevent unauthorized access to a guest's valuables, including redundant systems that require two employees to be present when a vault is unlocked. The newest high-tech safes even keep a record of who opens them.

"But if you override a safe in a room, you always make sure the guest is with you," he says. "Always."

Can you trust your in-room vault? As a general rule, the answer is "no," according to security expert Terry Riley of Santa Cruz, California, author of "Travel Can Be Murder: A Business Traveler's Guide to Personal Safety."

"The safe in the room is a nice repository for items which could go missing but are not absolutely essential," he says. "But the most secure place on a property is in the manager's office safe."

He agrees with Norwegian's Moyer on one point: "I've never heard of someone getting into a safe like that, either. It's outrageous."

The safecracking security officer is enough to make anyone wonder who else at a hotel or on a cruise ship might have the key to an in-room vault. Typically, says Cohen, only one person - the head of security - can gain access to a guest safe, but Riley is quick to point out that it's pretty easy for other crew members or hotel employees on certain units to get into a customer's valuables.

But Jeffrey Goldstein, president of safe manufacturer Hospitality Safe Corp. in Sunrise, Florida, says it's unfair to compare on-board vaults with those in hotels. "The safes on ships are rinky-dinky. They don't usually have the same security measures in place as they do in a hotel. And besides, ships aren't run like hotels."

There are no reliable figures on the security of in-room units. Only about 10 percent of hotels offer a personal vault - most of them are concentrated at upscale properties or in rooms set aside for business travelers - and about one-tenth of them are thought to have been broken in to at least once. It is safe to say that there's a great deal of mystery about the existing units in hotels and on ships.

The safes' directions can be difficult to understand, even contradictory. Many times, it's also unclear who else can get into the safe, and under what circumstances that could happen.

That's not to suggest the safes serve no purpose and ought to be removed - only that their functions could stand to be more clearly defined. After all, travelers expect their safe to be ... well, safe.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.