I’m more concerned that valuable documents were given to the hotel for safe keeping and were put in a box somewhere in the back.
My apologies. In my not-yet-caffeinated brain and in my haste to get this posted, I muffed some of the facts.
Due to my consuming 36 oz of triple caffeine Robusta coffee several times a day, my brain is always caffeinated.
What is the difference between shredded and destroyed?
Tape.
One is when paperwork is cut into thin strips to prevent it from being read.
The other is when paperwork is rendered useless by being dumped into a large bin containing coffee grounds, used tissue, half-eaten take out, dust etc. The latter may still be read, but is rendered totally useless for its original purpose.
Right. And not even a claim tag on the box, apparently? That then brings back up something touched upon earlier: the lack of a “culture of safekeeping”.
Yes, traditionally the recommendation for travelers has always been “give critical documents to the hotel for safekeeping”; but contrary to international locations or maybe more old-school-managed hotels in the USA, I can see that fading away in America where people don’t usually travel domestically with documents other than a driving license they keep on their person 24/7, and a worldview has developed of not letting your important documents out of your direct possesion, ever.
The thing to do is not casually ask them to store something for you, it’s to explicitly ask if they have a central safe deposit lockbox for valuables.
And then forgotten about. How long were those kids there?
It was supposed to be one week - Feb 17 - 25.
So they,
- Collected passports, not regularly done here in the US
- Put 'em in a box and stowed the box ‘in the back’
- Forgot what the box contained
- and handed it over the a shredding company
- without peeking into this forgotten box, just in case it was important
- all in a week
I think they need new managers at that hotel.
From the article:
TWO
days
The passports were gathered, put in a box NOT marked “important shyte keep secured do not throw away”, then it must have been in someone’s way so they moved it aside and it wound up sitting beside the stuff to be trashed.
I would suggest that the person who put the passports in the box did not forget they existed, someone entirely different gave the box to the disposal company. That’s the sort of mistake that can happen in 15 minutes.
Mistakes include:
Someone accepted the passports without having a procedure for storing them.
That someone did not effectively label the passports as important when storing them.
Someone threw away a box of stuff without checking what was in it.
They were not handed over to a shredding company-They were just tossed in the trash and the garbage company hauled it away.
Once again, they were not shredded.
If that box was near where trash is usually kept, then pawing through the trash would be unusual.
How much space do you need for 44 passports? If you are doing it all slack, a regular shoebox would be adequate. How much “in somebody’s way” is that going to be?
If you are placing valuable stuff in a back room, and not in a big metal box, you might choose not to label them as “important” or whatever, because you prefer that people not be curious about what is in it, but label it in such a way that it is obviously not trash.
I can see a European guardian of European minors arriving at the hotel and asking for a small(ish) box or pouch to be placed in the hotel safe. Nothing excuses the hotel’s screw-up though.
That could be as simple as setting it down on someone’s desk or near a phone or in front of a computer.
If there’s a shoe box sized object right where I need to put down a pad of paper while I’m on the phone, I’m pretty likely to shove it out of my way without much thought about it’s contents. I’d probably be more annoyed that someone put a box in such a stupid place.
I’ve gotta admit I was hoping for a better story, like maybe the front desk received a phone call from someone pretending to be a State Department official who managed to convince them that they had a box of passports that were dangerous forgeries and needed to be immediately destroyed in order to keep the USA from being annihilated.
Although if that had happened, I wouldn’t expect them to admit it, they’d probably make up something boring about accidentally giving them to their shredder company.
I don’t understand why the front desk didn’t put the documents in the safety deposit box. Every hotel I’ve ever worked in had a bank of dual keys safe deposit boxes. Even the “mom and pop “ run places like the motel where the kids stayed… as an aside why would a group of British kids fly to rural New Hampshire to go skiing? Maybe they should have stayed at the Holiday Inn Express off I-93 instead.
It might be that there was no official policy concerning putting customer’s items in the hotel safe, so the desk clerk put the items aside until she/he could speak to a manager. Clerk gets busy, forgets about the items or the manager never stops by during her/his shift, and the rest is history.