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Most of what keeps you safe in a hotel, apartment or guesthouse happens before you book, not after you arrive. We’ve stayed in everything from farm homestays in Peru to Airbnbs, B&Bs and hotels from one star to five, and we’ve never stayed somewhere that felt wrong. We put that down to the research we do before we go.
This guide is what we check before we book: the location, the reviews, the security features and the booking itself. It also covers how we plan for a late arrival and what we look at when we first walk into the room.
The Bird’s Nest at Treehotel, Harads, Sweden, and our view at Katamaran Hotel & Resort, Flores, Indonesia.
In this guide
Start with the location
Before we look at the room, we look at where it is. A lovely room in an area you don’t feel comfortable walking through at night isn’t a good choice, however good the price.
Open the map and see where the property sits in relation to public transport, the places you want to see and the streets you’ll be walking back along after dinner. We always work out where our accommodation is in relation to the sights and the nearest metro, train or bus stop before we go.
Then check the destination itself. Your government’s travel advice gives the bigger picture, but the risk in one neighbourhood can be quite different from the country as a whole, so it’s worth reading about the specific area too. Reviews (next section) are one of the best places to find out what an area is really like.
Lisa’s Tip
Don’t just look at the front of the building on Google Street View. Drop into the street and turn around to look in every direction, then move along the block. You get a much better idea of where the property sits in the area than you ever will from the listing photos.
Read the reviews for safety, not just comfort
We read reviews on Google and on booking sites like Booking.com, and we look at the photos guests have posted. Guest photos often show more than the property’s own, from the state of the room to what’s across the road.
Booking.com only lets guests who’ve booked review a property, so every reviewer has at least made a booking.
When you’re reading, look past comments about breakfast and pillows for anything about safety: guests saying they didn’t feel safe, comments about the area at night, doors or locks that didn’t work, or problems the staff didn’t sort out.
Keep in mind what you’re paying for, too. What you can expect from a room depends on the kind of accommodation and how much it costs. A budget guesthouse won’t look like a five-star hotel, and that’s fine.
Lisa’s Tip
I read reviews from opposite ends: the one-star reviews and the five-star reviews. I take the one-star reviews with a grain of salt, because people who leave one star are usually annoyed about something. But you can still get good information from them, especially if someone says they didn’t feel safe or the location isn’t good.
Check the security features before you book
Listings don’t always spell these out, but most can be found in the photos, the property description or the reviews. If something matters to you and you can’t find it, message the property and ask.
- 24-hour reception. Someone on the desk at any hour matters most when you’re arriving late (more on that below).
- Key card access. Some of our favourite hotels are the ones where you need your room key card to get the lift to your floor. Other guests and passers-by can’t simply wander along your corridor.
- Secure entry. Look for entry that’s controlled by key card or staff, and CCTV in common areas and corridors.
- Locks. A solid door lock plus an extra lock or latch you can use from inside, and locks on windows and balcony doors.
- Fire safety. Smoke alarms, a fire sprinkler system and clearly marked exits. Don’t assume they’re there: rules vary between countries and often apply only to newer or renovated buildings, so an older hotel may legally have no sprinklers, and a small guesthouse or holiday rental may not have them either. If it matters to you, check the listing or ask.
Which floor is safest?
We prefer higher floors, mostly for the view. Being higher up also means your room is harder to get into than one on the ground floor, where windows and balconies are easier to reach from outside. But our choice of floor is more about the view than safety, because we’ve already checked the hotel out before we booked it.
Good to Know
Common safety advice is to choose a room roughly between the third and sixth floors. That’s high enough to be away from the street, and within reach of fire-brigade ladders: in big cities, aerial ladders generally reach about six to seven storeys. It’s advice rather than a rule, and it matters more where a building’s fire protection is uncertain.
Book and pay safely
Booking through a reputable platform or company, or directly through the hotel’s own website, gives you somewhere to go if something goes wrong. When we stayed on a farm in Peru, it was booked through the company we’d booked our trip with.
We use Booking.com reasonably often, and we do everything through the app. If we haven’t been contacted through the app, we don’t respond.
That habit matters more than ever. Scammers send messages by email and WhatsApp that look genuine because they quote real booking details: your name, the hotel and your dates. The message says there’s a problem with your payment or booking and that it will be cancelled unless you “verify” your card, with a link to a page that looks like Booking.com but isn’t, where you’re asked for your password, card details or a one-time code.
Be aware that these messages don’t only arrive by email and WhatsApp. Scammers have also taken over hotels’ own Booking.com accounts and sent the same kind of message through Booking.com’s messaging system, so a message inside the app isn’t automatically safe either. The warning sign is the same wherever it appears: a request to click a link and enter or “re-verify” your card details.
If a message like that arrives, don’t click the link. Check your booking in the official app, or type the website address in yourself, and if you’re still unsure, contact the property using contact details you’ve found yourself, such as those on your booking confirmation or the hotel’s website. If you’ve already entered your details, contact your bank or card provider straight away and change your password.
Good to Know
In April 2026, Booking.com confirmed that unauthorised people had accessed some guests’ booking information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and booking details. Booking.com says financial information wasn’t accessed. In October 2026, the European Commission opened a formal investigation into whether Booking.com does enough to tackle fake listings and phishing. We haven’t received any suspicious messages, even since the breach.
Apartments, holiday rentals and homestays
We’ve stayed in Airbnbs about six times, and for around three years before COVID we were Airbnb Superhosts ourselves, with an apartment we owned. So we’ve seen holiday rentals from both sides.
We check an Airbnb the same way as a hotel: the one-star and five-star reviews, and the map. The difference is that you don’t always know exactly where an Airbnb is until you’ve booked. Airbnb doesn’t show the street address until a booking is confirmed, and depending on the host’s settings the map shows either a pin or only an approximate area. Every time we’ve booked one, we’ve messaged the host through Airbnb before booking to confirm where it is and make sure we’re happy with it.
Keep everything on the platform. It’s against Airbnb’s policy for a host to ask you to take a booking off Airbnb. Paying outside it means losing Airbnb’s AirCover protection, and Airbnb warns that a request to pay by bank transfer may mean the booking is fraudulent. We’ve also had friends whose host cancelled their booking at short notice, which can make it hard to find somewhere else to stay.
The other thing that’s always in the back of our minds with a holiday rental is that the owner has a key. The same is true of hotel staff, of course. So wherever we’re staying, if we leave something in the room, we make sure it’s secured. A laptop, for example, gets locked in a suitcase.
Plan for a late arrival
For at least the first night in a new country, we always book a hotel with 24-hour reception. Long flights from Australia often mean we arrive at night, and flights don’t always run to plan.
When we flew to Seoul, the airport in Brisbane was so busy, with staff off sick, that the flights were put in a queue for luggage loading. We sat on the plane on the tarmac for about two hours before we even left, which meant we wouldn’t get to our hotel in Seoul until around 1 am. I messaged the hotel to let them know we’d be that late, but with 24-hour reception, someone was going to be there anyway.
Before you leave home, save the address and a screenshot of your accommodation’s location on the map, so you can show a taxi driver or find your way even if your phone has no signal. It’s also a good idea to have the address in the local language if you’ll be catching a taxi.
Once you’re there, How to Get Your Bearings in a New City has the habits we use to find our way around.
When you arrive: a quick room check
Once we’re in the room, we have a look around before we unpack. Sometimes that’s simply about cleanliness: I’ve walked into a room before, looked at the floor and seen stains. Again, what’s reasonable depends on the kind of place and what you’ve paid.
Then a few safety checks, which take a couple of minutes:
- Read the evacuation map inside the room, which shows where the exits are. Fire-safety advice is to find the exits and count the doors between your room and the nearest one, so you can find it in smoke.
- Try any connecting door. We rarely have one, but I always check it’s locked.
- Try the balcony door and the windows. We always try the balcony door, because we’re usually straight out there looking at the view. On higher floors, windows often don’t open at all, or only a little.
- Use the extra lock on the door whenever you’re in the room. We always flick ours over.
Travelling as a couple, we feel that extra bit safer, but the checks are the same whoever you’re travelling with.
Valuables and the room safe
We don’t use the room safe. We don’t travel with much jewellery or many watches, and our passports stay with us wherever we go; we never leave them in the room. If we’ve brought laptops and we’re going out, they get locked in a suitcase.
Whether to use the safe is your call, but it’s worth knowing that in 2014 security researchers found a common hotel safe model could be opened with the manufacturer’s master code, which many hotels hadn’t changed. A safe is better than leaving valuables in the open, but it isn’t a vault.
Hotel wifi
Hotel wifi is fine to use, as long as you protect yourself.
Darren’s Tip
Use the hotel wifi, but always have a VPN running on your phone and your laptop. On a laptop, have antivirus software running as well. We use Bitdefender VPN and Bitdefender Antivirus.
There’s more in 8 Tips When Using Public Wi-Fi When Travelling and Should I Use a VPN Overseas?
Before you book
- Check the location on the map against transport and the places you’ll visit
- Walk the surrounding streets on Street View, in every direction
- Read the one-star and five-star reviews, and the guest photos
- Look for 24-hour reception if you could arrive late
- Check for key card access, smoke alarms and sprinklers
- Book and pay through the platform, the hotel’s own website or a reputable company
- Never enter card details from a link in a message, even one inside the app
Once you’ve booked somewhere you’re comfortable with, it’s one less thing to think about, and you can get on with planning the rest of the trip.
Until next time… keep wandering.
Last updated: 24 October 2026. Booking.com breach and scam advice, Airbnb policies and fire-safety guidance checked October 2026.
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