In room safe, what hotels

[torrenova 644]

They may be highly desirable, but not always cost effective.  If I can get a very nice hotel for 600 baht a night without electronic room safe and the hotels with electronic room safes cost 800 baht a night, thats a 200 per night savings.  I stay for 30 days so that a 6000 baht savings.  I've never lost a key, but if I did it would cost between 2000-3000 baht, so even then I would save 3000-4000 baht on the trip.  In the last 2 years I've spent 6 month in Pattaya and I've never had anything stolen out of my room.  Since my bank doesn't charge me any ATM fees, I don't carry much baht on me and hit the ATM daily, so in a way the ATM is my electronic safe.  A few times my guest for the previous night went with me to the nearby ATM the next morning after breakfast because I was a little short.

 

Emil

I take your point. I just really hate keys, for the room or for a safe. I remember when I lived in Mallorca and we used to have a little game whereby we (the residents) would guess which hotels the tourists were staying in, just by looking at their keys. It was surprising and disturbing how accurate we were !

 

I wouldn't pay an extra say Bt500 per day for the safe but when you do increase the budget, you gain not only the safe, but facilities, often better staff and perhaps location etc. I am really just surprised that the Sandy Spring, which has the perfect location for me, built their hotel recently and didn't specify in room electronic safes. It just seems that the Thais need to employ a farang during the design stages to identify which bits of 5* hotels are / should be incorporated into new build Thai hotels (not 5*) aiming for the farang market.