'I woke up to two men standing at the foot of my bed': The terrifying dark side of Travelodge revealed... as our investigation shines light on appalling security lapses and the women whose room keys were given to strange men

By KATHRYN KNIGHT, FEATURE WRITER Published: 01:00, 25 August 2026 | Updated: 01:00, 25 August 2026 Wendy Griffith had just switched off the bedside lamp in her hotel room on a warm July night last year when she heard a knock at her door. It was nearly 1am, and the 44-year-old marketing consultant from Norfolk certainly wasn’t expecting visitors, having checked in alone to her east London Travelodge ahead of a conference in the city the next day. ‘I called out “Yes”, and when I didn’t hear anything, I went to look through the peephole in the door,’ she recalls. What she saw horrified her: a naked man in the corridor outside her room, performing ‘disgusting, lewd sex acts’ while ‘blowing kisses’ towards her. Understandably terrified, Wendy’s first thought was to call reception – although with no landline in the room, and no contact numbers on display, she had to Google the hotel website on her mobile phone to try to find a number. When she finally found one, there was no answer. ‘I rang repeatedly but couldn’t get through – and all the while the man was still there, naked and knocking on my door. ‘He didn’t say anything, but it was incredibly frightening,’ she says. After half an hour of escalating panic, Wendy finally made the decision to call 999. ‘Within five minutes, six police officers came barrelling down the corridor,’ she says. ‘The man tried to escape and they had to use pepper spray in order to restrain and arrest him.’ Travelodge has seen a slew of recent reports that suggest a fundamental safeguard has, on occasion, badly failed  Wendy Griffith’s first thought was to call reception – although with no landline in the room, and no contact numbers on display, she had to Google the hotel website on her mobile phone Only later did Wendy make the even more horrifying discovery that her tormentor – a 40-year-old man called Trevor Reece, who was staying in the room opposite – had visited reception to obtain a key card for her room. ‘He’d pretended to lose his card and had given my room number. The only reason he didn’t get it is that the guy on reception at the time happened to recognise him and knew that wasn’t the right room,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to think about what might have happened if not.’ Sadly, there are many others who know the consequences all too well. For all the increasingly sophisticated technology involved in modern hotel security, the principle underpinning it could hardly be more basic: a guest has to be able to trust that once their bedroom door is closed, nobody without permission will be given the means to open it. Yet a slew of recent reports suggests that this most fundamental safeguard has, on occasion, catastrophically failed at Travelodge, the hotel chain with more than 600 hotels across the country. In February, 29-year-old Kyran Smith, from Staines, was jailed for seven and a half years for sexually assaulting a woman in her bed after reception staff at a Travelodge in Maidenhead gave him a key card to her room in December 2022.  A jury at Reading Crown Court – where Smith was convicted of trespass with intent to commit a sexual offence and sexual assault – heard that he had attended the same Christmas party as the victim.  Afterwards they retired to their respective rooms before Smith went to the reception desk in the early hours and asked for a key to her room, falsely claiming he was her boyfriend and had been locked out. No checks were made by staff, and the victim – now in her 30s, and who had never before stayed in a hotel on her own – woke to find Smith sexually assaulting her. After she shouted at him to get out, he returned the key to reception and went back to his own room. Horrifying as the Maidenhead case was, however, it was not an isolated tale. Reports of the case prompted a number of others to come forward to highlight their own terrifying experiences, among them a woman called ‘Lucy’, who spoke to the BBC about how reception staff at an undisclosed Travelodge had given a key card for her room to the very man from whom she was trying to escape. Lucy had booked herself into the hotel last October to get away from her abusive boyfriend. Yet somehow the refuge she believed she had found was breached when staff handed him access to her room. After entering, he physically attacked her. ‘I couldn’t believe it. The one place I thought he could never get to, he had somehow reached. I felt sick with panic. My safe place disappeared in an instant,’ she said. Lucy managed to convince her attacker to leave, only for him to return in a more aggressive state, kicking the room door off its hinges and forcing his way back inside. After finally managing to escape, she described how she ran to reception ‘shaking, crying and begging for help’ – only to be offered another room at the hotel. ‘It was the most traumatic period of my life,’ she said. These are, of course, extreme cases, although plenty of other former hotel guests also came forward to the BBC detailing embarrassing – sometimes briefly frightening – interludes. Little wonder, then, that earlier this year, in the wake of Smith’s sentencing, Travelodge said it had commissioned an independent barrister-led review to examine room access security policies and escalation procedures. Amid ongoing scrutiny, meanwhile – and particularly its response to the incident in Maidenhead – last week it was revealed that the chain’s chief executive Jo Boydell was to step down over Travelodge’s apparent failures. Last week it was revealed that Travelodge CEO Jo Boydell was to step down over the recent safety issues Journalist Laura Connor saw two men standing at the bottom of her bed at 4am in her room at the Britannia International Hotel Ms Boydell had claimed she only heard about the Maidenhead assault years after it happened, although it subsequently emerged that the victim had emailed her in January 2023, shortly after the attack. When questioned about this, Ms Boydell said the email had been ‘handled on my behalf’ and acknowledged there had been ‘serious failures’. It is familiar territory for Wendy Griffith, who claims that she too was ‘fobbed off’ by the chain following her own ordeal. ‘While Travelodge apologised to me initially by email, I felt I have never received a proper personal acknowledgement at senior level, with someone taking responsibility for what went wrong, and committing to meaningful change,’ she says. She adds that what happened to her exposed a wider gap between the security that guests understandably assume exists and the safeguards actually required by law. Her experience has led her to start her own campaign for root-and-branch change across the hotel industry to ensure the security of guests. ‘A lot of people don’t realise that at the moment there’s actually no legislation in place for hotel safety standards in the UK. That has to change,’ she says. Not least, she points out, because many hotel chains – including Travelodge – are used by local authorities and homeless charities as emergency accommodation to house vulnerable or potentially troubled people. Where, ultimately, does the responsibility for the behaviour of these people lie? In her case, Wendy understands that Trevor Reece – who subsequently pleaded guilty to outraging public decency in September 2025, and was sentenced to four months of alcohol dependency treatment and ordered to pay £185 costs – had been a resident at Travelodge Stratford for approximately two weeks after being removed from his council house home. ‘Why was he there? Who was monitoring him? Who was responsible for him?’ Wendy asks. While she has nothing but praise for the swift action of the police, she points out that it was only by a stroke of luck that reception staff recognised Reece and did not hand over a key to her room. ‘The fact is that he had the wherewithal to stop what he was doing outside my room, go and get dressed and then ask for my key – all in the small hours.’ The legacy of what happened has loomed large. ‘It rendered me utterly useless for the whole of the summer. I needed sleep medication and it took me a long time to feel normal and safe again,’ she says. ‘The reality is that, as the victim, you can be left to pick up the pieces by yourself. I’m self-employed, so there was no sick pay when I wasn’t functioning properly, and because I wasn’t physically attacked, securing compensation for the very real psychological damage has been incredibly difficult. ‘I don’t begrudge anyone receiving treatment that might stop them harming somebody else, but victims need meaningful support and recovery too.’ And while Travelodge may currently find itself at the centre of the storm, the uncomfortable truth is that the issue does not begin and end with one hotel chain. Across social media and consumer forums are accounts from guests, at hotels run by a range of operators, who describe the profoundly disconcerting experience of hearing their bedroom door open – and discovering that somebody else has been issued with a key that works. On the social media platform Reddit alone, threads dedicated to hotel security feature dozens of UK residents detailing how strangers have entered their rooms by mistake using key cards at several leading hotel chains. In December 2022, journalist Laura Connor, 36, was woken at 4am during an overnight stay at the Britannia International Hotel in London’s Canary Wharf to the terrifying sight of two men standing at the bottom of her bed. ‘I had obviously been fast asleep and woken by them coming in,’ she recalls. ‘They seemed quite agitated and were repeatedly saying, “This is our room. This is our room. Why are you in our room?”’ As calmly as she could, Laura got up and told the men it clearly wasn’t their room, and that they had obviously been given the wrong key – yet they seemed in no hurry to leave. ‘I was thankful I had pyjamas on because what if I hadn’t been dressed?’ she asks. ‘What strikes me now is that given I was a woman on my own and clearly frightened they just stood there for quite a while. I had to go to the door and open it and stand there until they left.’ Only then did the full panic set in. ‘I went down to reception and told them what had happened, but all the woman on reception said was, “Sorry about that.” She didn’t seem unduly perturbed.’ With no option but to return to her room, Laura spent the rest of the night wide awake, adrenaline pumping, as she wondered whether the two men might try to come back. ‘I went back down in the morning and asked for the manager and was given an email address – but after emailing I never received a response,’ she recalls. After tweeting about the incident, she was given a refund, but no apology. ‘No one ever said sorry, and that is the thing that really bothers me,’ she says. ‘It felt like they didn’t care and that my complaint was an inconvenience.’ While Laura feels lucky she wasn’t the victim of a crime, she believes what happened to her underlines the particular vulnerability of lone travellers – especially women – who have little choice but to place their trust in hotel security systems. ‘A lot of women have to travel and stay in hotel rooms on their own all the time for work, and you just assume there is going to be a system in place that means you are protected. But it turns out you’re not.’ Inevitably, the cases raise a wider question: just how robust are the safeguards governing who can be issued with a replacement hotel key – and should guests simply have to trust that every member of staff, in every hotel, will follow them? ‘The incidents we have seen reported are extremely serious and we understand the concerns that have been raised,’ a spokesman for industry body UKHospitality said this week. ‘That’s why, together with our members, we have been enhancing industry principles and guidance on guest security. ‘Developed with sector experts, we have continued to engage with ministers on this important work and received positive feedback from government on the work taking place to further bolster guest security. The final guidance will be published shortly and we look forward to continuing to work across the accommodation sector and with government on this critical work.’ A spokesman for Travelodge told the Daily Mail: ‘The safety and security of guests is extremely important to us, and we take any cases with the utmost seriousness. While room intrusion incidents are very rare across the 22 million guests who stay with us each year, we take every report seriously. ‘When an incident occurs, we investigate fully and thoroughly to establish the root cause and take appropriate steps to ensure the safety of guests such as retraining on room security and check-in procedures, reinforcing the vital importance of following these procedures without exception. ‘While the independent review by Paul Greaney KC is progressing, we have also conducted an internal review and have since made changes to our room access security policy and incident escalation procedures supported by training for all of our customer-facing colleagues.’ Travelodge said it had ‘completed a full deadbolt audit across all of our UK rooms, ensuring all key card operated doors have a secondary deadbolt facility’, meaning all rooms should now be manually lockable from the inside. ‘We have also partnered with a leading Violence Against Women and Girls expert who are delivering a tailored programme of senior leadership training. ‘They have reviewed our existing policies and procedures and will assist with how we respond to the independent review and its recommendations.’