Ros Tappendenand
Alex Meakin,South of England
Thames Valley Police
The Travelodge hotel chain says it has made “immediate changes” to its door key policy after a hotel guest was sexually assaulted by a man who was given the key card to her room.
Kyran Smith was jailed in February for seven-and-a-half years following the attack at a Travelodge in Maidenhead, Berkshire, in December 2022.
The chain’s chief executive Jo Boydell apologised to the victim in a statement on Sunday and said the changes would ensure additional or replacement keys were only issued with permission from the person staying in the room.
“We got things wrong and we should have acted sooner and I am truly sorry for that,” she said.
Prior to Boydell’s statement, the victim, who wishes to stay anonymous, told the BBC that Travelodge had “ample opportunity to deal with the case better” but “took a very long time to reply to me and didn’t really take it very seriously”.
“It was escalated in their company a little bit… but they still didn’t take the right precautions to deal with the situation,” she said.
The victim said: “You need to then think, OK, that’s not what should have happened, what can we do better to make sure that doesn’t happen again?”
Boydell said on Sunday: “I would like to express again how deeply sorry I am for what happened to the victim and for the mistakes we made in handling this.
“We got things wrong and we should have acted sooner, and I am truly sorry for that.
“I would welcome the opportunity to meet the victim to discuss what happened and to learn from our mistakes.
“We have done an internal review of our room access security policies and have made some immediate changes to ensure that an additional or replacement room key is only issued with explicit permission from the person, or people, staying in the room.
“This has been rolled out to all of our hotels, supported by training for our 12,000 customer-facing colleagues.”
The CEO said the safety of guests and colleagues was the “most important thing” and the company had commissioned an independent review of its room security measures.
Smith, from Staines, Surrey, had been at the same party as the woman during a night out in December 2022 when they and others retired to their rooms.
The woman claimed staff told her Smith, who was known to her, had passed their security checks by providing her name.
Getty
Speaking before the security changes were announced, she told the BBC: “I think it doesn’t overly matter what someone knows about someone else, like personal details.
“It wouldn’t be OK for you to issue a key to my room without my consent.
“If hotels aren’t doing that, they need to contact the person before they give a key away.”
The woman said her room did not have a chain across the door.
“Maybe that should be mandatory in all hotels, so that you remove a little bit more of the risk,” she said.
“One of my biggest concerns, and from looking at everything online, is how many people do get access to people’s rooms.”
Labour MPs Matt Bishop and Jen Craft met Boydell earlier to discuss security at the hotel chain.
Speaking after the meeting, Craft said the MPs asked for Travelodge’s internal review to be co-led by both a leading barrister and an organisation with expertise in issues around violence against women and girls.
She said they had also raised their concerns about the woman being “fobbed off” and the “insulting” offer of compensation.
“If Travelodge is going to convince people that it is a safe place for women to stay on their own, then they really have some work to do,” she added.
Commenting ahead of the meeting, the woman said it was good the issue was being highlighted, adding: “There needs to be better procedures for the issuing of keys, for giving out anything to do with rooms, really.
“It’s frustrating that it takes something like this to then push those kind of things forward but I’m glad that they’re actually looking at it.”
The company, based in Thame in Oxfordshire, said Boydell had also requested a meeting with the safeguarding minister.
