In the months leading up to last year's Global Congress on Travel, Founder Stephen Barth was featured in a New York Times Travel article by Michael Luongo. While business travelers may worry about strangers, Stephen Barth, the founder of hospitalitylawyer.com and a professor of hotel law at the University of Houston, said co-workers present risks, too. “People are normal until they check into a hotel room,” he said, adding, “The entire duty of care that companies have for their employees, such as harassment policies, still apply when traveling with another employee.” Mr. Barth said it was once common practice to give out the hotel room numbers of guests when outsiders called. This method was used in 2009 by a stalker, Michael David Barrett, to locate the room where an ESPN sportscaster, Erin Andrews, was staying. He secretly videotaped her through a hotel door peephole. While hotels generally no longer give out room numbers, Mr. Barth said the same information still could be found on room service door tags and gym sign-in sheets.

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July 25, 2011
At a Hotel on Business? Be on Alert, Too
By MICHAEL T. LUONGO
The discussions about hotel safety recently have centered on what happened in a suite at the
Sofitel in New York between Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International
Monetary Fund, and a hotel maid.
But business travelers can fall victim to attacks, too, by intruders, hotel staff, even other guests.
Most often, the victims are women.
Paxton Quigley, a women’s safety consultant in New York and author of “Not an Easy Target”
(Fireside, 1995), said most women business travelers were “just beginning to learn how unsafe
they can be, especially in airports and planes, hotels, walking on streets in cities that they don’t
know and in convention settings.” Conventions, she said, leave women particularly vulnerable
because “they’re wearing name badges and are telling people where they are staying.”
Jeannette Duwe said she was staying at a hotel in Reno, Nev., while traveling for the grocery store
chain Albertsons when she was attacked in 2002. She was working late on news releases in the
business center when a man pried the door open and began bothering her. “I asked him to leave a
couple times,” she said, adding that she “made the mistake of turning my back to him, which is
when he hit the lights and attacked me.”
Eight weeks pregnant at the time, she said she worried that no one could hear her scream, but,
“Something spooked him after a couple minutes and he ran off.” She immediately called the front
desk for help.
Travelers can take several steps to protect themselves, said Marybeth Bond, a women’s travel
expert in San Francisco who runs www.gutsytraveler.com and has written several National
Geographic women’s travel books. Women need to “trust their instincts,” she said, if a situation
seems awry. When hotel employees make deliveries, she said, travelers should either leave the
door fully open or say, “I’ll take it from here — you don’t need to come into the room.” Ms. Bond
carries a rubber doorstopper to jam under her hotel door and says she makes sure any adjoining
hotel room doors are locked.
Ms. Bond also said hotel bars could be problematic. “Men are always hanging out there looking

2. for something,” she said. “I love the hotels where I can order a glass of wine and have it brought
up to the room. Ask for a woman to bring it.” In this way, she said, “You set the tone, and then
they know you are taking control of the situation.”
Hotel bars can be relaxed settings for meeting other business travelers. But Ms. Bond said women
should be aware that date rape drugs could be placed into a drink; she recommended coasters
from Drink Safe Technologies, which detect some of these drugs.
She added that if consensual sex occurs, “When someone is in your room, lock up your stuff.”
Trouble often starts when a traveler allows someone in a hotel room, said Joe A. McInerney, chief
executive of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, an industry group. “Very few things
that happen in a guest room would have happened if the guest did not let the person in,” he said.
Hotel lobbies have also become popular gathering spots, and that, too, can spell trouble. “The
lobby is becoming a place for young people to be social,” Mr. McInerney said. “We used to call
them ‘lobby lizards’ in the 1920s — people just hanging out in hotel lobbies. Now, it’s back with
social networking.” That, he said, “is how they do things,” he added, “and that can be a problem.”
Mr. McInerney noted a couple of other highly publicized sex cases involving hotels. One was the
rape of the singer Connie Francis in 1974. Her lawsuit against the hotel led to industrywide
security changes. Another he cited was the 1992 rape of Desiree Washington, a contestant in the
Miss Black America pageant in Indianapolis, by the boxer Mike Tyson. After that incident, Mr.
McInerney said, the hotel association began posting guidelines, available on its Web site, to help
prevent assaults.
Men can be victims, too. A well-publicized case was the murder in January of the Portuguese
journalist Carlos Castro in New York. His companion, Renato Seabra, a male model, was charged.
“On a crime of passion, there is really nothing you can do,” Mr. McInerney said, but there is a
need to “educate people that you do the same things” for both sexes regarding safety.
While business travelers may worry about strangers, Stephen Barth, the founder of
hospitalitylawyer.com and a professor of hotel law at the University of Houston, said co-workers
present risks, too. “People are normal until they check into a hotel room,” he said, adding, “The
entire duty of care that companies have for their employees, such as harassment policies, still
apply when traveling with another employee.”
Mr. Barth said it was once common practice to give out the hotel room numbers of guests when
outsiders called. This method was used in 2009 by a stalker, Michael David Barrett, to locate the
room where an ESPN sportscaster, Erin Andrews, was staying. He secretly videotaped her

3. through a hotel door peephole.
While hotels generally no longer give out room numbers, Mr. Barth said the same information
still could be found on room service door tags and gym sign-in sheets.
Most incidents in hotels are not widely reported, said Ms. Bond, the women’s travel expert.
Ms. Duwe, the 2002 hotel attack victim, who now runs her own public relations company in
Idaho, is a case in point. “I don’t think the attack hit the news because it wasn’t severe enough,”
she said. She said she later took kick-boxing classes to protect herself. Still, she said, “When
you’re in the business center and someone cuts the light out and hits you from behind and you’re
in flip-flops, it’s just an all-around bad situation.”