What You Need to Know Before Purchasing A Safe
or
The Facts about In-room Safes

What do you need to know before purchasing electronic safes for your property?

First of all you need to ask: what is a safe? Is every locked box a safe? How do you determine what is a safe and what isn't? Are there any standards? What is the guest's perception when storing valuables in an in-room security box? And what do the law and the insurance companies say?

User Perception vs. the Facts

User perception is often different from the facts. Safe vendors, together with hotels, need to be very clear about the function and liability of electronic safes. There are many different types of safes on the market, but for purposes of clarity, they can be divided into two major groups:

A. Safes - heavy safes defined by governmental or state standards.
B. Safety Boxes - light-weight safes with no regulatory standards.

The first group is easier to define because standards exist for bank or jeweler safes. There are clear UL and VDMA standards describing how long it should take to break into a safe using a specific kind of tool. With this type of safe, insurance regulations will normally cover content loss to a very high degree that is determined by the classification level of the safe.

The problem lies in the fact that security comes at the price of convenience, ease of use, and price. When considering the purchase of safes for hotels, cruise ships, hospital wards or patient rooms, and university residence halls or dormitories, these safes are too large, heavy, and inconvenient for frequent use.

Unlike heavy safes, electronic in-room safes must be relatively small and extremely user-friendly. They can be installed as wall safes, drawer safes in desk and bedside table drawers, and in closets. This naturally puts them in the non-standard safe group. On the surface, this might appear to make the manufacture's life easier, since if there are no standards to conform to, there can be no liability. In reality, exactly the opposite is true.

Safe Construction Guidelines

Conforming to rising customer expectations is more difficult and problematic than conforming to a set standard. The manufacturer needs to be intimately familiar with the customer's needs in order to evaluate the long-term product implications. Liability is always a burning issue despite the fact that the product is a non-standard safe box.

When hotel guests are told they have a safe in their room, they rightly expect that their valuables will remain safe from theft, whether in-house or from outside the establishment. Courts will find in the guests' favor when valuables disappear, no matter whose fault it is.

What commonsense guidelines are needed to develop hotel and resort safes, cruise ship safes, condominium safes, hospital safes, senior residence safes and dorm room safes in universities?

On the construction side, the guidelines are fairly clear. The “safe” (safety box) should resist the efforts of small-time burglars using tools like screwdrivers, light hammers, etc. None of the in-room safes on the market are resistant to heavy equipment like electrical drills, disks, or sledge hammers. In general, thieves cannot bring this type of equipment into the busy environment of a hotel or other institutional setting.

A thief with long-term access, the ability to bring in heavy equipment, and no fear that someone will hear the resultant noise will certainly succeed, but this is a rare occurrence. The hotel is normally a secure environment which invests in discouraging "unwanted visitors."

Guests tend to travel with a minimum of personal valuables such as laptops or mobile phones. Therefore, it makes little sense for a burglar to design a “forced-hit” on a specific in-room hotel safe.

The electronic/operational side of safe construction is a more sensitive area. Since all the safes at a particular hotel are the exact same type of safe, if a thief finds a way to open one, he can open them all. The problem is complicated by the fact that safe users change on a daily basis. By definition, the hotel must have access to these safes in order to override them when necessary. This puts a heavy burden on the hotel security staff and reinforces potential liability claims.

It is exactly at this critical point that safe manufacturers need to invest the majority of their energy and resources to provide the hotel with the most secure means of protecting guest valuables and hotel liability. What should you look for in an electronic safe?

First Rule: No Universal Tool

The first line of prevention lies in reducing risk by separating each and every hotel. While this makes production more complicated, it is extremely important. At Safeplace, we designed the core software of our override handheld and safes to be different from hotel to hotel. This means that any problem with theft or the loss of an override tool is confined to the specific hotel, making it relatively easy to solve the problem.

Second Rule: Total Control

Control is the second parameter required to prevent misuse of the override tool. First of all, control means physical control over the handheld unit. The hotel, hospital, cruise ship or university dormitory management must know where the control unit and any additional equipment is located at all times. An override code is not secure because it can be passed from one user to the next without management being able to monitor which personnel have acquired code access.

Control also means adding that crucial extra parameter before a member of the security staff can open a safe. Safeplace has developed the most secure access barrier available through contemporary technology: biometric fingerprint access to the control unit. Only security personnel whose fingerprint has been imprinted in the control unit have access to guest safes.

Third Rule: Personal Responsibility

In a hospitality or institutional environment, the most dangerous act may be the one that leaves no trace and cannot be pinpointed as a specific person's responsibility. That is why personal responsibility is the third critical parameter that should be stressed to avoid misuse. All operations of the control unit should be traceable by date, time, room number and, most important, user ID.

Fourth Rule: Flexibility

When all is said and done, mistakes can still occur.

This raises the important question of what happens if an override card is misplaced, a key staffer leaves, or some other unforeseen circumstance occurs.

The answer to this question constitutes the fourth critical parameter: flexibility. Flexibility means the ability to solve the problem straightaway at minimal cost to management. Safes in which the cylinder key must be replaced require an additional investment of time and money. With today's technology, this has become out-of-date. All the essential parameters of the override procedure should be programmable in case of loss or theft.

Yet no matter how advanced the technical solutions are, it still takes two to tango. That's why a manufacturer dedicated to the development and production of electronic safes for the hospitality and institutional markets should stand behind the electronic safes you purchase. Manufacturers like Safeplace work closely with clients to help them implement secure operating procedures to suit the specific market environment. At Safeplace we believe that sharing ideas, in-house training, and a forthright discussion of security problems with clients are all part of our responsibility, and constitute the key to success.

We invite you to send us comments or questions about this article.

An earlier version of this article was published in the Safeplace Scoop, a print newsletter that is sent free-of-charge to key players in the hospitality industry. If you would like to receive the full color newsletter four times a year, please contact us.