59% of guests steal from hotel rooms

SURVEY:A SURVEY of British hotel guests which indicates that nearly 50 per cent are happy to steal items from hotel rooms is not reflective of the Irish hotel experience, according to a leading hotelier.

The survey, published this week by online hotel booking engine hotwire.com, found that as many as 59 per cent of guests make off with something from their hotel room.

Toiletries and stationary are the most frequently removed items. Towels, alcohol and slippers are other commonly stolen items.

The travel website interviewed more than 2,000 men and 46 per cent said it was acceptable to steal stuff from hotels with men, Londoners and younger tourists being the worst offenders.

More than two-in-five said they would be less inclined to take items if they had not paid so much for their hotel room.

The president of the Irish Hotels Federation, Paul Gallagher, who also manages Buswell’s Hotel in Dublin, expressed surprise at the high number of people who said they believed it was okay to remove items from their room and said that in Ireland the amount of theft was considerably lower than that.

“It seems like a high number to me,” he said. “I would tend to disregard toiletries because they are there for the guest’s use and we don’t really mind if they are consumed on or off the premises.”

He said that in his experience, face cloths are the next most likely item to go missing while umbrellas left in guests’ rooms often disappeared, although he did not believe people were intentionally stealing them.

“I think Irish hotels offer very good value for money, so people don’t feel the need to take stuff home with them,” he said. “We do take people’s credit card details but most hotels are very reluctant to engage in correspondence with a guest about missing items, as they would have to be absolutely sure who was responsible and, with high throughput of guests, that can be very hard to prove.”