The three hotel safety tips that flight attendants swear by whenever they travel – and why you should too
SOME people have safety routines that they follow whenever they leave their house, or for when they arrive home.
Us flight attendants are absolutely no different and a lot of us have little regimens we use whenever we stay in hotels to make us feel a lot safer.
It’s not without good reason either, with plenty of us able to share horror stories about our overnight accommodation when working away.
For instance, I’ve heard of passengers following people from their plane to their hotels and trying to get spare keys to the room.
Those are rare instances, but when you work all over the world as we do, you’re never sure who you’re going to cross paths with, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
In this week’s blog for Sun Online Travel, I’ll explain the steps we take to make sure we’re safe and sound in our hotel rooms once we’ve arrived.
That includes the most common request of flight attendants when staying in hotels abroad – to be given a room on a floor near the ground.
Those are the rooms that I always feel safest in, simply because they’re closest to the exits if you need to use them.
While it’s true that the nicest rooms are often on the highest floor of the hotel, that’s also probably the least safe place to be in the building.
Sure they’re comfortable and cushy, but you don’t spend all that much time in the hotel anyway and if you’re on the 30th floor and there’s an emergency, you’re the furthest away from the exit.
I always ask for a room no higher than the tenth floor.
I don’t care if that means I’m not getting a nice suite or whatever, I’d rather have the peace of mind. A lot of us do it. We’d rather be able to escape than have a nicer vantage point.
If you’re on the 70th floor and there’s an emergency – and you can’t use the lift, you’re going to encounter far more chances of something going wrong while evacuating.
I’d rather just have a short journey down the stairs and out the fire escape.
There are other ways in which we can protect ourselves, with some handy gadgets for our rooms.
One of the most popular is a door stop, with an alarm attached.
Passengers also make these safety mistakes when getting on board our planes
Not charging devices
Sometimes airline staff might ask you to prove your phone, or any other device, works as expected.
This is to show us that it’s actually a phone and not just a phone case hiding something sinister or banned.
If you’re unable to prove your device works, we have the right to take your phone off you and force you to leave it behind at the airport.
It’s either that, or you don’t board with it – those are your options.
Vaping on board
This is really stupid – imagine the panic you could cause by creating a billow of smoke in the plane cabin.
A lot of people think they can get away with vaping, but the smoke is so thick and often comes with a pungent aroma that we’re more often than not going to catch you in the act.
Storing electric devices in the overhead bins
This is a huge fire risk and you should never do it. Phones, vapes and other devices should be in your personal bag under the seat in front of you, if it has to be on the plane at all.
If the batteries crack in a certain way, they can very easily start fires and that’s the last thing you want to happen in a metal tube 40,000 feet in the sky.
That is put on the floor behind the door, so that if someone’s able to open the door, not only will it be wedged in place, but a really loud alarm will be triggered letting everyone know that there’s an intruder.
I’ve heard one go off before and they’re loud enough to wake up the entire floor of the hotel, if not the one above and below too.
It’s good to have this in place so we know that if anyone even tries to come in, there’ll be an obstacle and an alarm preventing them from doing whatever it is they’re hoping to do.
Other things that we use include special door locks with chains that can be clipped to the top of the door to also make sure that no one gets in.
These devices don’t cost a lot – a lot of them are less than £10 or £20 on Amazon, but they can really make the difference and provide us with an extra bit of safety once we’re in our rooms.
That’s not to say that what we’re doing in there is at all civilised or normal – flight attendants are weird people and some of them do some pretty strange things when they get to their rooms.
One of those is cooking and cleaning their clothes using the hotel room equipment.
For instance, people will use the irons for toasting and heating up food.
It’s a lot more common for them to do that than you’d imagine and I’ve had instances where I’ve gone to iron my shirt and there’s been crumbs and bits of burnt cheese on the iron.
it’s really gross and you know it’s a flight attendant because these hotel rooms are often kept aside by the hotel especially for cabin crew members.
I’ve also heard of people boil-washing their knickers in the hotel kettles.
It’s pretty hypocritical because we’re always really judgey about passenger behaviour, but some flight attendants are far worse when they get to hotels.
That’s not to say I’ve done that, but you hear stories about others who have and it makes you feel a bit queasy.
We get really annoyed by people making a big mess in the plane seats, I feel we should be more empathetic towards the hotel cleaning staff and the other guests.
Meanwhile, these are the strict rules flight attendants have for sick passengers.
And these three items of clothing regularly get passengers barred from our flights.