How An Empty Water Bottle Can Keep Your Valuables Safe While Traveling

Traveling with valuables can be fraught. You devote a significant portion of your "vacation brain" to worrying about what could happen to them while you're out of your hotel room sightseeing or at a business meeting. Most hotels have a safe with a key or a combination lock, but those aren't always the most secure places to leave anything that you absolutely cannot live without. What can you do? Leaving things in your luggage is asking for trouble, and sometimes, these are items that we can't travel without.

There is a genius hack for keeping your smaller valuables safer in your hotel room while you're out, and it is a great way to fool potential thieves. The idea is to use the humble reusable water bottle, which you're probably traveling with anyway. It's hard to believe that we can find a benefit from the hassle of traveling with liquids these days, but here we are! Plus, you're helping the environment. 

You're probably already traveling with a reusable water bottle to save money on pricey airport bottled water in the first place — make sure you're going through security with the bottle empty of any liquids. Plus, bottled water can be extra expensive if you're traveling abroad. It helps save on single-use plastics as well, and — we didn't tell you this and don't condone it — lets you take certain beverages into a venue in a non-obvious way. It's also a great place to store small valuables like jewelry. 

For this hack, you'll need an opaque bottle so you can't see what's stored inside, and make sure, of course, there isn't residual water in there when you put your items in it. One with a wider mouth is an excellent idea so you can get your things back out. There are even ones with hidden storage on the bottom, like the Diversion Safe Water Bottle. There are also fake bottles that are only used as safes. You can put some paper towels in there to keep whatever it is from rattling around if someone shakes it.

So why shouldn't we be using the hotel safe? This is the first place a thief would expect to find valuables. Remember that if you forget your stuff in a safe, the hotel can open it for you, whether it's done with a code you create yourself or a key that gets lost. That means anyone could use that code or key to open it for other, more nefarious reasons. Not only that, but it's a really easy thing to miss as you repack your suitcases to leave the hotel. 

You do not want to forget anything important enough to put in the hotel safe to begin with. But if you use a hotel safe for anything, one great hack is to keep one of your shoes in there. It's very unlikely that you'll leave wearing only one shoe. As you begin to use this hack, ensure to text or email yourself to remember to repack that water bottle before you leave or use a carabiner clip to attach it to your luggage.