About 10% of the tourists staying in Romanian hotels or guesthouses take various objects from the rooms when they leave, according to a survey made by hotel booking platform HotelGuru.ro.

The most frequent things to be stolen are towels, which disappear in 73% of the cases in which tourists take things home with them. Next comes cutlery, in 44% of the theft cases, and the remote control, in 22% of the cases.

Sometimes tourists also take sanitary items of the food and drinks in the mini bar, which they do not declare when they check out.

In rarer cases they also leave with the bath robes, the bed sheets, the paintings on the walls, the metal trays and even the flower pots. One of the respondents in the survey even said that a tourist took the fire hose.

Another unusual case reported was a tourist who replaced all the LED lights in his room with ordinary incandescent light bulbs.

The hotels and guesthouses who responded in this survey have recorded losses of some EUR 500, on average, this year, due to theft. About 140 hotel owners and managers participated in the survey.

Two thirds of the hotel managers say they don’t do anything when they notice the thefts, saying it’s the risk of the business. Most of them, however, keep records of clients who steal things and refuse to check them in again.

HotelGuru.ro is an online hotel booking portal which includes 1,700 hotels and guesthouses in Romania and 51,000 units all over Europe. The site is owned by Hungarian group Szallas.hu, one of Central Europe’s fastest growing 50 technology companies, according to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 in Central Europe.

editor@romania-insider.com