How safe is the room safe?

On another thread a poster included a link to safekeeping your valuables while on board. Here is the link.

http://www.travelinsurancereview.net/tips-and-advice/travel-safety-tips/avoid-being-robbed-on-a-cruise/

What jumped out at me was the warning about keeping valuables in the room safe. We are very careful about what we take on a cruise but we all need things like passports, phones, cash and credit cards which we keep in the room safe. Has anyone ever experienced a theft from your room safe, and if so, how was it resolved?

25+ years of cruises on 7 diff lines and never had any problem.

Nor with anything mysteriously disappearing from our cabin. :rolleyes:

Between cruising and Las Vegas we've used Room Safe everytime and not one time has there been an issue.

Room safes in hotels and ships can be accessed by others but it takes a LOT of effort (and usually the complicity of others). Avoiding obvious key codes like your room number or 0000 etc will probably deter 99.99% of would-be thieves.

What's the alternative? hiding your valuables in your room or trying to put your stuff in the ship's / hotel's Master safe (if they allow) - not really convenient.

25+ years of cruises on 7 diff lines and never had any problem.

 

Nor with anything mysteriously disappearing from our cabin. :rolleyes:

6 lines and ditto. I have even accidentally left cash or jewelry on the counter. If anything, the cabin attendant placed it in a less conspicuous spot. However, I don't take good jewelry on a cruise.

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Room safes in hotels and ships can be accessed by others but it takes a LOT of effort (and usually the complicity of others). Avoiding obvious key codes like your room number or 0000 etc will probably deter 99.99% of would-be thieves.

 

What's the alternative? hiding your valuables in your room or trying to put your stuff in the ship's / hotel's Master safe (if they allow) - not really convenient.

I agree with your appraisal. We use our safes in the ship's cabin and in hotels all the time and have never had a problem with theft.

I think the statement in the article lacked any facts or statistics to support the argument that the room safe is not safe. One thing, I am not taking may own safe, that seems absurd.

I have been traveling for decades and prior to having a room safe, I would leave our passports and airline tickets (prior to electronic ticketing) with the hotel clerk in an envelope that was placed in the hotel safe. To me that alternative was less secure than having a room safe. Still, back then it was the best.

I'm not so sure how safe, though we've never lost anything from a safe short of gambling money in the casino ;)

We had a safe malfunction last year. Maintenance and security were unable to open it and while it took them two hours to drill it open they left the instructions on the top of the replacement safe.

In those instructions were a master code, a series of digits which could be changed to, used to override the guest entered code and open the safe. I tried the instructions and it worked. If the "master code" which can also be changed, is known, you can open the safe without the guest code. If the master code was not changed, anyone who knew the default master code could open the safe. Other models have master keys, or electronic methods.

The master code on our safe was not changed after it was replaced. Do you think they changed any of the 1000+ safes onboard? Doubtful.

This being said you can't find these instructions online or at the safe manufacturers website so I doubt many employees know this. E,players are also logged in and out when they open a particular room so the trail of who could have been in the room should be pretty small, and with few places to hide I do believe theft onboard is exceedingly rare, but as other threads have shown, it does happen.

It would totally piss me off if it happened to me, but it's only stuff, even a passport, and while some stuff has serious sentimental value, we try and go with the flow and move on. While it hasn't been a lot of things, we've lost or left behind more stuff, like a pair of earrings bedside, or a necklace on a bureau, that haven't been recovered or returned, than we've had returned or stolen though most things we've left behind do find their way back to us.

Happy sailing,

Jenna

We have never had a problem with a room or cabin safe. Once when we got on the Constellation, the previous occupants of the cabin had left the safe locked. We notified our cabin attendant. He had no access, and had to notify someone else to come open the safe (which they did.)

On a cruise ship, you get to know your cabin attendant well, and they have always seemed to be honest, hard working people. The ships have cameras everywhere and you can bet that entries into the room (and which key opened the door) are logged somewhere.

In short, I think you're fine with the room safe. That said, use common sense and leave the truly valuable things locked up at home.

We never take anything of value with us on a holiday wherever we go. Therefore would put things in safe, but not worry about them.

The first person to come under suspicion would be the room steward, so are very unlikely to rob you.

If we did lose things, although an inconvenience, we would claim on our travel insurance. To be thinking you may get robbed before even being there is very negative thinking. It would be the last thing on my mind. I would be thinking of what I was going to wear and planning our excursions.

We've never had a problem leaving things in our room safe. We've also accidentally left cash or jewelry sitting out with no problem.

We've never had a problem leaving cash, passports, etc in our room safe. But we did have an incident on Reflection when our safe for whatever reason was locked and inaccessible. Someone from security came down and unlocked it in about 30 seconds. So, there is a way to do this. I would never leave anything irreplaceable in there.

To the OP, that was not a post here on CC, so to insinuate it was, well....

At any rate, I believe you will find only one 'recent' issue with theft posted in the X forum and that was in a public space.

Please let us know what YOUR experience has been in this, room safe, regards on your previous sailings.

I will even allow for anecdotal (a friend of your great grandmother's second cousin twice removed) if that helps you.

bon voyage

Never had any thing taken from the safe but on two cruises we had the battery that works the safe die and had to wait for security to come and open and replace. The first time we waited almost three hours which put a damper on our plans for the day.

J.

No problems with room safe in a hotel or on a cruise ship after 40 plus years of traveling. Guess we are lucky.

The cabin safes are "safe enough." I guess if you are carrying $200,000 in cash or diamonds you might want to make special arrangements with the purser :). But otherwise....

Hank

The cabin safes are "safe enough." I guess if you are carrying $200,000 in cash or diamonds you might want to make special arrangements with the purser :). But otherwise....

 

Hank

Like Kim Kardashian should have done in Paris:D:D

25+ years of cruises on 7 diff lines and never had any problem.

Nor with anything mysteriously disappearing from our cabin. :rolleyes:

Agree! 34+ also on different lines and never anything taken from our cabin:)

Thank you for all the responses. We have never had a problem either but since it was mentioned in the link I thought I would ask the question. I never INSINUATED anything or said the article was posted here on CC, just the link. Just looking for others experiences.

It's as safe as a safe anywhere! It's fine..no worries! If you don't trust it...simply lock your valuables into your empty suitcase....I don't believe a suitcase has ever "gone missing" from someone's room!

Never had a problem with the safes, been on 9 cruises or so.:)

No problems ever, except one time I left the safe wide open with a lot of valuables in it.:eek: The cabin steward hunted us down to let us know. Very nice of her!

On our last cruise, our number coded safe suddenly would not open one morning. We told the Butler and he had someone up to our room very quickly. The man swiped a card in a reader on the safe and it opened. He said "there you go", and that was it. No explanation on why the safe would not open,etc..

We used the same passcode as before to lock the safe back. Now I wonder why the safe would not open. Could it mean that someone had tried to get into it with a wrong code and then the thing shut down?

On our last cruise, our number coded safe suddenly would not open one morning. We told the Butler and he had someone up to our room very quickly. The man swiped a card in a reader on the safe and it opened. He said "there you go", and that was it. No explanation on why the safe would not open,etc..

 

We used the same passcode as before to lock the safe back. Now I wonder why the safe would not open. Could it mean that someone had tried to get into it with a wrong code and then the thing shut down?

If you enter the incorrect code a certain number of times it will lock the safe but there are other reasons / ways.

Happy sailing,

Jenna

Never had any thing taken from the safe but on two cruises we had the battery that works the safe die and had to wait for security to come and open and replace. The first time we waited almost three hours which put a damper on our plans for the day.

J.

We also had the safe battery die. We realized it bc we were sure we had locked the safe only to return later to find it open. Nothing was missing. We relocked it, and voila...it popped open again. Called engineering and they replaced the battery, we re-set our code and all was well. That being said, don't bring a lot of valuables on any vacation.