Feel Safer in Any Hotel Room with These 3 Gadgets

Checking into a hotel or Airbnb should feel safe - but too often it doesn’t. Break-ins, weak locks, and even hidden dangers like carbon monoxide can leave women feeling anxious instead of confident.

In this Quick Tips episode, Julie Waite shares three simple travel safety gadgets that can transform how secure you feel when you close the door. Affordable, portable, and easy to pack, they give you extra protection and real peace of mind.

You’ll discover:

• Why hotel locks aren’t enough to rely on.
• The invisible risk that takes travellers by surprise.
• How smart preparation turns fear into confidence.

If you want personal safety tips for women - whether you’re on holiday, staying in an Airbnb, or moving into student accommodation - this episode shows how a few simple tools can help you feel safe, strong, and in control.

👉 Links to the gadgets Julie recommends: www.streetwisedefence.com/blog/best-self-defence-gadgets

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Join our community of people taking back control of their safety - and get instant access to our free self defense and safety tip downloads.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Travel Risks
• 0:55 Essential Travel Safety Gadgets
• 3:36 Portable Security Solutions
• 5:07 Carbon Monoxide Awareness
• 7:43 Key Takeaways for Safe Travel

Transcript

Every year UK travellers report break-ins, theft, sexual assault and even carbon monoxide deaths in hotels and holiday rentals. These aren't just shocking headlines though, they're real risks. The good news? Three simple travel size gadgets can change how safe your room feels tonight.

Welcome to Self Defence for Women, Live an Empowered Life, the podcast that helps you stay safe, feel strong and take control of your personal security, both physically and emotionally. I'm Julie Waite, Women's Safety Advocate and co-founder of Streetwise Defence. We share real-world safety strategies, expert insights and practical tips to help you feel more confident wherever life takes you. And before we dive in, if you find this helpful, please follow the podcast and leave us a

review, it helps more people find this. So not every traveller assumes a hotel room or holiday rental is safe, in fact many don't. That's why you see all these viral TikToks of people tying ironing boards to doors or dragging furniture across the floor just to feel secure at night. And they're not paranoid. One global survey found that 15 % of guests have experienced a theft or burglary during their stay, with the average loss topping $2,000 per incident.

adding the tragic stories of carbon monoxide deaths in rentals and it's no wonder travellers can feel anxious. So in this Quick Tips episode we're showing three small packable gadgets that give you real peace of mind.

So the first gadget that we're looking at today is the Alarmed Door Wedge. Got one here. I discovered this a few years ago and I think they're absolutely brilliant. I take it with me whenever we go travelling. All you do is you put it underneath your door, assuming the door is opening inwards, you put it underneath the door and...

It does two things. One, it stops the door from being opened fully. And two, this gets pressed down and activated and it sets off a really loud alarm. It's got rubber underneath to stop it from slipping and you put a battery in there and it's really small. It costs about 10 pounds off Amazon.

I'll put a link to all of the gadgets that we recommend in the show notes. We've got a blog with loads of different self-defence gadgets in, travel gadgets, safety gadgets, all the ones that we recommend and use ourselves and this is in there. Like I said, it's about £10 so I don't know why you wouldn't get this and take it with you. I use it if I'm travelling by myself but also we've used it on family holidays. We went to Egypt a couple of years ago and we had a really long hotel room.

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so that our bed was furthest away from the door but the kids single beds were right next to the door and then there was a bathroom in the middle and they felt very far away from us and even though I had Dene with me I felt a bit nervous about that so we put the door wedge there and it was just that extra safety thing that we knew that if someone tried to open that door we had a good warning that we could get up and do something about it.

So a couple of things to bear in mind, always make sure you test your battery to make sure that it's working and you need to just check it how it's going to work with the door. Is it going to work with the carpet? Will it fit under the door? So it works with a lot of doors, but not all doors. So you can't 100 % be assured that you're going to be able to use that.

The next gadget that we're going to look at is the portable door lock. I've got one here.

This actually isn't the one that we recommend on our website. We've tested loads over the years, but that's just an example of it. I've not got that one today.

you fit them depends on the model that you've got but generally you open the door and then there's one element that fits in the actual door kind of in the door frame and then the other element is on your side and it stops someone from opening the door inwards.

Again, they don't work on all doors, but they work on most doors. And that is brilliant, particularly if you're going travelling somewhere where you can't really rely on the safety of the door, the hostel or the hotel that you're in. The one that we recommend is about 10 pounds, again, off Amazon. Small, easy to fit in your luggage and combined with the door wedge is a really good way of securing your door.

Both of those gadgets are also great for if you are at university or you've got children going to university and they are staying in shared accommodation and they want something on their own room door, their own bedroom door. Quite often in rented accommodation you can't go putting things like bolts on the door, the landlords won't allow that, but they can use either or both of those to give themselves that added bit of safety.

And the third gadget that we recommend for travel is a travel sized carbon monoxide alarm. I've not got it here with me, but we've got a picture of it and we've got a link and information about it on our website. Every home should have a carbon monoxide alarm, but this is a little travel sized one that you can take with you wherever you go, especially for holiday rentals.

So this is something that I've just recently added to our safety blog after hearing a news item earlier this year.

So a coroner issued a warning urging travellers never to rely solely on accommodation safety standards after an inquest into the death of an 18 year old student who died from carbon monoxide poisoning while staying in a holiday cottage in Scotland.

I've looked into this and although these cases are rare...

There's enough of them, there's enough news headlines from around the world to make this a gadget that it's worth investing in. They're about 20 to 30 pounds. Another case in 2022, three American tourists were found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a Mexico City Airbnb. Investigators traced the cause to a faulty water heater in their room and there was no carbon monoxide alarm in

in that property and then earlier this year three American women were found dead in a Belize resort. Again it was a faulty water heater in their room and I think carbon monoxide is just something that...

You don't really think about it until you hear these cases and then it's something you kind of think we've got an alarm there in the corner, but you don't necessarily think about when you go traveling So what I would suggest is get one of these alarms take it with you when you go traveling test your alarm at home if it's battery-operated test that and Just never ignore them. I know the case in Scotland

The alarm actually went off the night before downstairs and they thought it was a fault because all the appliances in the kitchen were working fine or something along those lines. They thought it was faulty so they took the batteries out of it and then of course the next day this young man died in the bathroom. So it's just a really simple, quick, easy, cheap gadget that you can take with you and just help keep your family safer.

So three key takeaways for you. Travel should and can be a lot of fun, but just taking a few extra safety precautions can help ensure that you have a really happy and safe time.

layering up your security, thinking about the alarmed door wedge and the door lock. And of course, if none of those work, you have got other options again, then that would be where you might want to drag a chair across and put it in front of the door. It might not stop someone coming in, but it just would wake you up if someone tried the door. Then.

In the invisible risks like the carbon monoxide poisoning, these are real risks and just getting a small little alarm can really help

and just being prepared, thinking ahead, making sure you test any and all of these gadgets, testing them, testing the batteries regularly. Also, have a look at our earlier blog on personal safety gadgets, where we talk about things like personal safety alarms, torch and the phone apps. And like I said, all of these things are listed in our blog with more detail. We've got links to the models that we recommend and I'll link that in the show notes. So if you found this helpful,

Please share it with someone else who you think would benefit from it. We'd love a review and subscribe so that you get all of our episodes and until next time, stay safe.