‘Lost passports cost us our £5k cruise. Then they turned up under a tea tray in Premier Inn'

Telegraph

16-05-2025

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Dear Katie,
My wife and I stayed at the Premier Inn in Colchester on March 20 for one night en-route to Tilbury, where we were due to board a cruise ship.
On the morning of our departure, we enjoyed a full English breakfast at the Premier Inn buffet, before going back up to our room, packing up our things and checking out.
However, when we arrived at Tilbury, we were horrified to discover that both of our passports were missing from the plastic wallet we put them in, which also contained all our cruise tickets and information.
We went back to the hotel and checked the bedroom, only to find our passports were not there and it had already been cleaned. We reported the missing passports to the staff. We were beside ourselves, as without our passports, we were unable to board the cruise, which we had paid around £5,000 for.
In the end it sailed without us, and we went home feeling very upset. Five days later, I received a call from the Premier Inn which left me stunned. I was told that our passports had been found in the room beneath a tea tray. Of course, we find this highly suspicious as according to their manager, all rooms undergo a deep clean following every guest.
We feel something untoward has gone on here, yet Premier Inn is denying it has anything to do with any of its staff. We have travel insurance but it is refusing to pay out because we left the passports in the room and not in a secure safe. However, the Premier Inn room did not have a safe.
– Anon
Dear reader,
How galling to have lost out on this expensive cruise which you and your wife had been looking forward to going on for so long, over the issue of missing passports which had later turned up under mysterious circumstances.
You suspect a member of staff at the Premier Inn may have entered your room while you were out to dinner, or while you were at the breakfast buffet in the morning, and taken the passports. You then think that when you raised the alarm, the perpetrator may have panicked and put the passports back under the tea tray for someone else to eventually find.
I told you I was prepared to explore your theory with Premier Inn, however, I needed to ask you some questions first. I urged you not to be offended because in order to be fair to all parties, I had to consider all possibilities before asking you straight up: did you put the passports under the tea tray?
You scoffed at this assertion, flat out denying it. I asked if either you or your wife had any diagnosed memory issues such as dementia, to which you said that no, you did not. I accepted this and approached the Premier Inn to proceed with your investigation.
I asked the Premier Inn to confirm whether there was CCTV footage on the corridor in which your room was situated, to which it replied that no, there was not. However, it was in possession of data of who had opened the door to your room, and when, as each time a key card is used it is logged on a computer system.
Premier Inn said the door data showed that no one entered your room between you checking out and subsequently reporting that you had lost your passports, and the team going up to look for them, which apparently they did within 10 minutes of being notified that they had been forgotten.
It said the team had checked the room, as well as the cleaning trolleys used by cleaning staff, and there was no evidence to suggest any member of its team had taken the passports.
As pleased as I was that the door data for your stay was available, I told Premier Inn I really needed to see it in full in order to rule out anyone else having entered the room. However, Premier Inn refused, citing 'data protection reasons'.
I asked you for your exact movements when you both went out for dinner in the evening – you said you left at 7pm, ate at KFC and then visited a friend in another part of town before heading back to the room at 11pm. In the morning, you both went down to the breakfast buffet for around an hour before returning to your room, packing up and leaving.
I shared this timeline with Premier Inn and it checked the door data and assured me that no one else had entered the room between these times. In fact, the door data showed that only you and your wife entered the room between the time you first arrived at the hotel and you checking out, it said.
This seemed pretty categorical so I decided to pursue the only line of inquiry I had left, so I called you up and asked to speak to your wife.
I asked her whether there was any way she could have left the passports under the tea tray. She described this suggestion as ludicrous and swore on another family member's life that she had not taken the passports out of the little plastic wallet at any stage.
I explained that I was not accusing anyone of anything, but simply had to ask to be fair to everyone involved. It had occurred to me that if one of you had decided to hide the passports under the tea tray in a bid to keep them safe while you were out, and then had a memory lapse about having done it, you might now decide to keep schtum for fear of upsetting the other one.
An error which ended up costing your dream holiday, and so much stress and heartache, would be hugely difficult to admit to at this stage.
Whether one of you has dragged Premier Inn's name through the mud in the national press when you knew it was innocent, or whether you were the victim of a crime and the true culprit is still at large, remains a mystery. But whatever the case, I have a feeling that neither of you will ever leave your passports somewhere insecure ever again.
A Premier Inn spokesman said: 'If the guests believe a crime has been committed, we strongly recommend that they refer the matter to the police.'