Stranger
Is the safe in your room large enough to hold a laptop?
Many are not.
We don’t travel with a full sized laptop. Well, it’s small but a real laptop. My wife and I are debating whether or not to take that, or a tablet on our next trip.
I always use a tsa approved combination lock. Sure, it only keeps the “honest” people out but if anything is likely to get stolen from it, hopefully it’s an area that might have cameral surveillance. However, probably the best reason is the locks keep the zippers shut as with rough handling they sometimes slide open.
In the hotel we always use the safe in the room if it’s so equipped.
In my family, it’s my wife that insists on using luggage locks and I’m the one who doesn’t see the point. (Neither of us use hotel safes; maybe once in the past 20 years.)
You’re the second or third person to say that. I travel all the time and I’ve never had a zipper open accidentally. My experience is that zippers fail in “hard to open” mode, not “fall open” mode. And I’ve had several pieces of luggage wear out and fail one way or another. I wonder if it’s different styles of luggage.
Fortunately, I only had it happen once and it was when I was picking up luggage at the carrousel and I had clothing and other items sticking out of the “unzipped” bag. This is years ago as I’ve used locks ever since and TSA approved locks since they’ve been required.
OK, so I’m on the last leg of my trip (Amsterdam to JFK), and the hotel in Amsterdam struck me as safe and homey enough that I never bothered to put my laptop in the hotel safe. (BTW the safe was big enough to fit my 14" laptop and looked big enough to fit my 15.6" laptop, which I didn’t have with me.
My suitcase and my husband and kids’ all have tight zippers; we’ve checked just 1 bag and I hope it’s not open when we claim it.
Sometimes it won’t appear open, but then you open it and there’s a piece of paper inside saying something like, Hi, this is TSA (or whatever), and your luggage was one randomly selected for inspection. Or words to that effect.