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I have seen all kinds of videos on YouTube demonstrating trivial methods of opening hotel safes, the kind that are in the room. In one video the guy opens the safe with a potato.
Are these videos using some kind of fake safe that is not actually used, or a in-room safes as insecure as the videos suggest?
In-Room Safes are provided for peace of mind and to prevent petty pilfering by maids and room attendants. They are not super secure like a bank vault or a regular sized home safe.
The simple fact that guests frequently forget the combo they used (or lose keys if a safe is so equipped) means that the safes have to be easily opened by other means. Otherwise the hotels would spend a fortune calling locksmiths.
Some may well be as cheesy as the one used in your videos, but others are more secure and difficult to "crack". You can't really draw a blanket conclusion.
It is considerably safer than leaving your valuables under your pillow.
All safes are designed just to slow an attacker, or make an attack noisier, so that the likelihood of discovery is increased. They are not designed to prevent all attackers getting in.
For that purpose they do a good job. In fact if the safe is too secure, the attacker may just rip it off the wall, as happened to me on holiday one year. The attacker just crowbarred it off the wall and opened it later (police discovered it empty on a building site the next day.)
And the one in the video is definitely not near the more secure end of the hotel safe market :-)
You have to put this in the context of all the other security measures. A hotel where I recently stayed has an elevator that requires swiping a key-card before use. There are cameras at the stairs, elevators and before the rooms. So, if something gets stolen, the thief will appear on camera. A log of all key-card swipes is kept. Now breaking into your room without a key-card is not easy, it would require a lot of time. This will be noticed on the security cameras during the attempt, so this won't happen.
Given this security situation, you're only going to be vulnerable to a hotel worker stealing your stuff unnoticed. The hotel worker gets in for cleaning, takes away something of value that you won't immediately miss, puts it in his/her pocket and gets out. If you only notice that this stuff is missing after a few days then it's not so clear who could have stolen it. It might have even have been accidentally lost on the streets, so you can't then use the key-card swipe data to narrow the culprit down to a single hotel worker.
The safe-locket is then a good measure to defend against this loophole. It forces you to collect valuable stuff, merely knowing that you did have possession of something a few hours ago, that this was present somewhere in your hotel room and is now not there anymore, will point to the hotel worker being the thief. So, even if the safe-locket can be easily opened, the hotel worker won't dare to do that. There is also no way for the hotel worker to physically remove the safe-locket and walk away with it, unnoticed. Taking a picture of your stuff before you close the safe-locket will make it this work even better,a you'll then have rigorous evidence to back up your case.
In a different context where you don't have much security in the hotel, a thief may well be able to steal items from a safe-locket and get away with it.
More secure safes are usually more expensive. In cheaper hotels you can assume that they will have bought the cheapest safes they could find. But even the interior decorators of more expensive hotels will usually care more about aesthetics than security.
Also keep in mind that the hotel staff will always be able to open the safe. Someone will have a master key/code in case you forget your personal code.
