Agreed. The hotels I stay in are generally very similar in terms of room-structure, amenities, etc. I suspect that my subconscious doesn't register a new hotel room as a new experience, but rather as an old, familiar, and safe one.

I bet that someone's very first experience sleeping in a hotel would yield a poorer quality than their 100th one.

Is this a cultural difference ?

An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key and I rely on an unfamiliar security system to warn me when things go awry (fire, blackout, water leak etc)

The only places I would feel less safe would be a night train or a taxi in the middle of nowhere.

>An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people [...] has full access to the door key //

Do you normally sleep in an especially secure room? There seems as much likelihood that a hotel staff member would "break" in to my hotel room as someone would break in to my home. It's marginally easier for staff but then they stand to lose their livelihood, are much more likely to be caught, et cetera.

Do you leave a door propped against the door handle, or a handle alarm, or anything, to mitigate your feelings of exposure?

I feel it might be different depending on where you live, but in Japan/France I always have a inside lock that prevents someone to unlock the door from the outside.

In Japan it was a door chain, in France you leave the key in the door and it blocks external keying. Also you'll have to pass the building gates before reaching an appartment.

It's not infailable, but it's significantly more protected than any standard hotel room.

More than anything I remember unintentionally screwing hotel keys by having them with other devices, and the hotel front would reprint them pretty easily without asking anything more than the room number and the registered name.

Serious question: are you really so afraid of the tiny possibility of someone breaking into your room while you're sleeping that you can't sleep well in hotels?

If that's true, I seriously wonder how you ever get in a car.

I sleep decently in most conditions (I can sleep in parks for instance), it's more that hotels feel inherently 'public'. It's a place owned by someone else, maintained and cleaned by employees, ruled about under a company's rules. If I had to put it in a bucket, it would go with shopping mall bathrooms, train compartiments or compamy shower rooms.

As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table while you're out, as you would in your house.

> As a sign of that you wouldn't leave valuable stuff on an hotel room table while you're out, as you would in your house.

Speak for yourself.

I routinely leave my most valuable possession (my laptop) in hotel rooms. I'm not paranoid.

Every hotel I've ever been in has had a swinging door guard or chain lock, which means no one can get in if you've locked it from the inside.

Those locks are trivial to defeat within seconds with the right method and inexpensive tools. They're also unlikely to hold in the event that someone tries to breach the door by force.

The same is true of any locks you have on your home

"An hotel room is a place where I am supposed to sleep while a decent number of people (the hotel staff + anyone caring to social engineer) has full access to the door key"

I've been in a hotel where my room had 2 large bolts on the inside of the door in addition to the normal lock. This did nothing for my quality of sleep!