Exploring the Secure Hotel Threat Portal with Dr. Jeff Moore

0:00

Fred:

Hi, I’m Fred Burton here today with Dr. Jeff Moore. Jeff is a globally recognized hotel threat analyst and the creator of the Secure Hotel Threat Portal, the world’s largest database on hotel violence. Jeff holds a PhD in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism from the University of Exeter and has supported U.S. government intelligence and policy initiatives, including serving at the Pentagon. An author of two books and over 150 articles, Dr. Moore has briefed top security organizations worldwide and earned the U.S. Army’s Distinguished Civilian Service for Bravery Medal for his actions on 9-11. Jeff, welcome to the Ontic Connected Intelligence Podcast.

Jeff:

Thanks for having me, Fred. I really appreciate it. And I love Ontic. You guys do great work. Great work.

Fred:

Thank you. Thank you. I’m really intrigued with the Secure Hotel Threat Portal, which we’ll get into. But before we go there, tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to starting Secure Hotel.

Jeff:

Right. Just very shortly, I mean, You covered it nicely there in the intro, but originally from North Carolina. I still go back home a lot, Eastern North Carolina kind of fellow, and spent a decent amount of time in Southeast Asia, living in a few countries, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and whatnot. And a graduate of Hargrave Military Academy. I wasn’t a terrible kid, but I needed some structure, so Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia for high school, and then East Carolina University, and then, as you said, Exeter. always wanted to be in the defense sector. So I worked for SAIC. And they put me in the Pentagon eventually. And again, later on work for a couple of other defense contractors did the PhD. And the hotel thing came about this way I was, you know, data and statistics were becoming more of a thing in threat analyses. And your book where you talk about your, your career and with Secret Service, but especially diplomatic security, just hammered home, you got to know the tactics of the bad guys. And you have to know the context of the strategic situation of the threat as well. Those two big things. And it seemed that ever since 9-11, the threat profile around the world went through the roof, especially regarding the Islamist jihadist threat. And so I kept looking for some kind of business sector that suffered a lot of violence. And we looked at gas and oil, we looked at mineral mining, And we even looked at Western stores, Western retail outlets like the UK’s Tesco and Starbucks and Pizza Hut, because a lot of times they get trashed during these strikes and riots and whatnot. And they all suffered a decent amount of violence. And that sounds macabre. But you know, we were looking for something with a lot of stats that could produce a lot of statistics. And it was hotels, hands down, you know, so in the US, it’s, you know, 30 to 80 acts of violence every single month. For hotels in the US and that’s just what’s reported in the press new hotels can get anywhere between a hundred and three hundred calls a year that’s not all dead bodies and beat up people a lot of it’s like a ruckus in the parking lot or a dead body in a hotel or what not but some. So that’s the us and then internationally it’s anywhere between twenty and forty acts of violence every single month and again that’s just what’s reported in the press. So we go through these articles and we’re able to mine specific data points daytime place all the static information. But also we get really good dynamic information how did the bad guys approach the hotel of what did they do and how many people killed how many people wounded star ranking of the hotel the brand and all that. And so the fascinating thing, after a couple 100 cases, after 1000 cases, now we have 3654 cases. And we have some data gaps, we’re a little behind. But the patterns of violence that come out and the reasons why, and who’s doing it and where it’s happening. It’s just incredible. So the intelligence is designed to try to help revolutionize the hotel sector and the sectors that support it security and insurance and and hopefully even law enforcement.

4:47

Fred:

You know Jeff that’s fascinating i know just as all of us do whether it be in the private sector the public sector you know we spend a great deal of time and hotels and I remember years ago writing an analysis when I was at Strategic Forecasting talking about how hotels were embassies of the future, meaning they were constantly being attacked and so forth. So based on your subject matter expertise with Secure Hotel, what type of violence are impacting hotels globally? And is it hotter in certain regions versus others?

Jeff:

Right. So unfortunately, the United States has the probably the most hotel violence and it’s overwhelmed, overwhelmingly, yeah, overwhelmingly violent crime. And we thought for a while we were just missing some reporting because I kept looking at Egypt, I was thinking that there would be more violent crime there. But if you look at strategic statistical analyses of violent crime in other countries, you know, Egypt doesn’t suffer that much violent crime. Now, of course, your physical assaults and sexual assaults are massively underreported globally, and we recognize that. So if you’re doing a like an iceberg chart, You know, the tip of the iceberg regarding physical assaults and sexual assaults is just going to be above the waterline and the bulk of that iceberg is going to be underneath the water. But for shootings and stabbings and bombings, grenade attacks and things like that, the vast majority of the iceberg is over the water. So in the US, it’s mostly violent crime. There is something called SRCC, which is an insurance term, which means strike, riot, civil commotion. And that’s anything from a brawl of a group of people to a violent protest where the violent protesters might smash out the windows. or just inundate the hotel and harass and do a little vandalism and get out. We’re seeing a lot of that by the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian crowd against Jewish hotels, or even hotels where a Jewish-related bank maybe facilitated the loan or something like that. So it’s violent crime, strikes rights, civil commotion, terrorism, and malicious damage, which is vandalism, and then war. And America is number one in violent crime. We get a little bit of terrorism here. And sometimes the terrorism label is dependent upon, and you know this very well, the prosecutorial discretion of the police department or the DA or whatever that’s levying these charges. Antifa, for example. They’ve done some violence at some hotels. The Black Lives Matter folks have done some violence at hotels. All of it is textbook. It meets the textbook legal definition of terrorism. But none of these people, I don’t think, have been charged for it. Then there’s a lot more terrorism in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, especially when there’s a war going on. War damages are pretty heavy in places in Africa where you might have a warlord who doesn’t want to give up power. And the UN comes in to block said individual and they actually hold up in a hotel. Um, the UN will deploy and they’ll have their guns and their armored personnel carriers and whatnot. And there’ll be an exchange of fire, um, you know, Bushmaster cannons, RPGs, and they’ll all go flying and there’ll be some war damage in that regard. Our big war damage right now though is Ukraine. There’s over 20 hotels that have been impacted by military ordnance ranging from S-300 missiles to Iskandar cruise missiles and aerial bombs and artillery and drones now, drones.

8:32

Fred:

You know, Jeff, I’m not surprised and yet I am. You know, the data is obviously from an analytical perspective just fascinating to me. And so if you look in the continental United States, I know we have a lot of protection teams and we have a lot of folks in our business that are protecting ultra high net worth individuals and so forth. As you look around our great nation here, do you know off the top of your head what cities are more violent affecting the hotel industry versus others?

Jeff:

City-wise, that is a little elusive off the top of my head. I can tell you the states that are most violent regarding- Sure. I’d love to know. Florida, Texas, California are three of the most violent hotel states, which is fascinating because California has very strict gun laws. Texas doesn’t. And Florida is in Florida. And I love Florida, by the way. Houston texas has quite a bit of violence and most of it is in some of the more impoverished areas at the lower ranking hotel so. Internationally and especially the us your one and two stars are gonna suffer about two thirds of the hotel violence and then the three four and five stars are gonna suffer about one third of the hotel violence. The California violence is all over the place. It could be San Francisco, it could be San Diego, LA, and little towns all over the place. And so the hotel market describes it as a primary, secondary, or tertiary. Primary markets for hotels is the big cities like Chicago, New York City. And there is hotel violence in New York City and Chicago. And there’s been a lot in Chicago, actually. The secondary markets are your middle-sized towns like Charlotte, North Carolina, about, what is it, 2 million people now? I don’t know. Something like that. And then your tertiary markets are your little towns all over the place, like where I come from in Greenville, North Carolina. And very frequently, you’ll see quite a bit of violence at the secondary and tertiary markets over the primaries. It’s just scattered all over the place.

10:42

Fred:

Yeah, that’s very interesting. Now, if you are a protection team or corporate security director of, let’s say, a Fortune 500, and you have employees traveling all over the place and so forth, what advice would you give to that security officer or to that protection manager on some of the things you should look for from a safety perspective?

Jeff:

Right, great question. Harking back to a little bit of what we talked about earlier, number one, look at the strategic threat context of that country or that region. So we’ll use East Africa, for example, and this is actually a real case study. In East Africa, you’ve got one of the most prolific hotel attacking groups in the world, Al Shabaab, right? And they even have a special way of attacking hotels that we call it the Mogadishu special, which usually comes from Mogadishu, right? They attack so many hotels in Mogadishu. Starts usually with some kind of large IED, usually a vehicle-borne IED. And then light infantry guys will run in, usually a fireteam size, about four guys usually, armed with AK-47s, grenades, and sometimes a suicide vest. They fight to the death. They kill as many people in the hotel, et cetera, et cetera. Al-Shabaab has also attacked hotels in neighboring countries, for example, Kenya. And so here was this case where a young lady was going to Kenya. She went to Kenya. And she had chosen a particular hotel and her security team said no we don’t want you to go to that hotel there’s not enough setback. From from the road to protect us from an idea there we don’t want you there we’re gonna put you in the juice it d two compound. Well. The Doozit was attacked in 2019 by an Al-Shabaab team, and it was a terrible massacre. And this is- Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, we profiled that attack on securehotel.us. And the funny thing, not funny, but I actually started my morning routine of grabbing research from the internet while the attacks started. And actually, they had it going on video on YouTube live. It took us about a month to put all that together. One of the morals of the story here is, if this security team had looked at the strategic context, and this was the second thing, the bad guy TTPs, the tactics, techniques, and procedures of the most prolific hotel attackers in theater, they never would have put her in the doozy. And setback is an issue, but Al Shabaab concentrates on the raid. Yes, they start out with an IED, but then their light infantry fighters come in. And you need to be in a hotel that ideally is not going to be the most attractive target to them. So instead of just focusing on the raid, excuse me, the IED, the explosive device, the vehicle born IED most of the time, you need to focus on the raid, which probably would have put her And maybe not a five or a four star hotel probably would put her in something a little less. Hi this a little less fancy maybe something a bit closer to the airport or maybe the airport hotel where there’s gonna be a little bit more. protection and when the bad guys attack an airport hotel, the good guys can always come in with an aerial assault and there’s a lot of room for them to get to a hotel at an airport. So things of that nature come into play when you’re talking about giving advice to a security team protecting VIPs overseas.

14:50

Fred:

For the average listener that’s going to listen to this, whether it be a protection officer doing an advance or a corporate executive or just your average salary or Joe that’s traveling, what advice would you give for that individual as to what floor to stay on at a hotel, and what are some of the things that that person should be thinking of from just the range of different threats predicated on what you see every day with what you do at your company?

Jeff:

Right. Great questions. So obviously, if there’s a fire, you don’t want to be too high up in the hotel. The higher up you go, the harder it is for that fire truck snorkel ladder to get to you, and the more danger you’re going to be in from smoke inhalation and fire because fire goes up. And actually, there was a huge fire at a hotel in Bangladesh, let’s see, on 5 August 2024. There was a strike, riot, civil commotion, an SRCC type situation. The bad guys came in and looted the place and committed a lot of vandalism because the hotel was owned by a political opponent. And they ended up setting the thing on fire, killing 25 and wounding 150. So you obviously want to stay on a lower floor to get out. I have stayed in hotels where I would actually look out the window and say, and this was mostly in Southeast Asia, can I break this window and shimmy down a drain pipe if the hotel gets inundated by bad guys? Which would be another lesson. If there is violence in the hotel, you want to try to get out as soon as possible. And you want to try to get out in the safest way possible, obviously. But better to shimmy down a drain pipe Or break a leg and stay in the hotel and get dragged out shot that those are the most. Precarious and the most dangerous and the most flagrant violations of human nature of. The most harrowing kinds of violence you can you can suffer they’re not super common but they do happen every year. Regarding crime and whatnot, making sure that there’s not anybody set to ambush you when you’re going from your car to the parking lot is a huge one. We see a lot of violence in the parking lots of hotels regarding strong arm robberies and unfortunately sexual assault. I’m keeping your door locked, latched all the time, you get into your room, you latch it, you check everything you check under the bed, you check the closet, etc, etc. There was just a $177 million lawsuit against I believe it was Hyatt, because they had hired a security officer who used his security credentials to get into the room of a woman and raper. And that verdict just came out. So things like this are important to know.

17:42

Fred:

Jeff, are there any kind of little small security gadgets that you carry to help you secure that hotel room that you could, I guess, not be flagged at TSA and then take it from you if you’re traveling or whatever? Any advice along those lines?

Jeff:

Any door wedge. And I would urge people to buy these cheap little door wedges off of Amazon and go experiment with them in your own home. but take two of them to a hotel and so i use one where you’re actually it’s like a little vice and you’re screwing part of it down into the floor and there’s a rubber stopper there and it keeps somebody from coming into the door most of the time and that’s good for Airbnb’s by the way i’m if you’re in an Airbnb the proprietor is gonna have a key to the place and they can come and go as they please So it would behoove you to have some kind of door locking mechanism. I always do that. And there’s door locks that I’ve tried that don’t work on all the different locks around the world, but the door wedges seem to work very nicely. And if you can get the long one that’s like a baton, if you can get that fit into your luggage, that’s a really good one to use as well.

Fred:

You know, I know in another lifetime ago, uh, as a young man, I was with, uh, the rescue squad and we used to carry the, um, those little wooden door wedges. So like, if you’re searching, uh, searching a house and you open a door, you can wedge that door. So it doesn’t close behind you kind of thing too. I guess anything to just slow people down. Correct.

Jeff:

Right, and try to get off the X as much as you can. A lot of people will say, hunker down in your room, try to turn your room into a safe room, and even security teams will have some kind of space inside the hotel where they want to turn the bathroom into a safe room. If somebody starts a fire, and we see a lot of terrorists and even robbers start fires in hotels, You do not want to be in there. You will die from smoke inhalation or obviously heat exposure. So the best thing to do is try to get off the X, try to get out of the hotel.

19:45

Fred:

Now, Jeff, looking ahead as you look out over the horizon and you live and study this industry every day, what do you forecast over the next five to 10 years in the industry?

Jeff:

Yeah, I would like to say that security will improve, but it’s going at a very slow pace. MGM instituted a ton of security improvements after the 2017 Vegas massacre. Joe Dua over here at the MGM Grand at National Harbor talks a lot about this. I’ve given two talks over there through ASIS. And they have a wonderful security team. So MGM has made a lot of improvements. But I would say the vast majority of hotels out there are not prepared for a Mumbai. And they’re not really doing a good job on countering crime either. Violent crime, shootings, stabbings, drug deals gone wrong, prostitution deals gone wrong, even shootouts in Marriott’s and four and five star hotels. It’s not super common, but it happens. So These kinds of threats, the basic criminal threats, it’s kind of hit and miss right now. If policing increases and gets better in America because we slacked off because one side of the political fence decided that police were bad and we needed to defund them, policing got rolled back, crime went through the roof. Better policing, a more secure community is going to protect your hotels. That’s number one. Number two, I think in the US, we’ve got obviously more left versus right, right versus left political violence. And I would say not for the next five years, but certainly for the next six months, leftist political violence is really increasing. And left wing political violence hits hotels in America much more than the right. So we are actually expecting this kind of thing. And if the left-wing political violence ramps up, there could be right-wing reprisals. It’s not just going to be at hotels, but hotels are certainly going to be hit by that. Islamist jihadist terrorism has not diminished. It is picking up, as we saw in New Orleans on January 1st. That actually impacted two hotels. There was an IED left in front of a hotel, the Four Points Sheraton, on one of the street corners. And the final shootout of that terrorist happened at, uh, Sonoma. Uh, let’s see. It was the, um, I can’t remember the name. It was the Royal Sonesta. Royal Sonesta.

Fred:

Yeah. I’m very familiar with that place.

Jeff:

Yeah. So, um, I did not know that. Yeah. Yeah. So we don’t see Islamist jihadist terrorism dialing back and we see it ramping up. Um, and then for the long, long run, The propensity for war to happen in Eastern and Central Europe, will Russia dial it back? Will they increase things? That does not look good to us. We don’t like that. The Iran missile exchange with Israel and the propensity for them to continue to look for a nuclear weapon. The war scenarios in the Middle East don’t look good. And we don’t like the possibility of the war scenarios in Southeast Asia, regarding China and the and the nations that it is intimidating and Taiwan. So the big potentially big destructive things like we’ve seen in Ukraine, can we we’re thinking that this is a five, five year trend right now looking out, right? Not good.

23:10

Fred:

Yeah well I appreciate you sharing that with our listening audience now we’re not putting on the spot here Jeff we ask everyone of our guests this question. What does the term Connected Intelligence mean to you? 

Jeff:

First of all it’s a beautiful term and I wish more people would do it. Connected Intelligence means stripping down the silos and integrating intelligence with all of your operational planning and decision-making. At the hotel level, it would mean having threats and risk intelligence integrated with security, but also your risk managers who’d figure out what kind of insurance your hotels are going to get. That should be also connected to the insurance brokers and the underwriters. At the CEO levels at the hotels, your bean counters, your financial folks, and even the CEOs need to be made aware of the threats. So they will stop treating security like B-suite, like the little kids table at Thanksgiving, and start putting a little more effort into this, similar to the way the MGM has done. So integrated intelligence across the board.

Fred:

Yeah, that’s a very, very good answer. Now, Jeff, if folks want to learn more about your website and what you’re doing in this space, and I really think you’re filling an extraordinarily valuable niche here for folks, where can they get more information?

Jeff:

Securehotel.us. It’s that simple. Log on to securehotel.us, and we’ve got over 150 articles talking about different types of hotel attacks. We analyze what went right, what went wrong. We cover some security issues, some lawsuit issues, and the lawsuit issues against security negligence at hotels are just going through the roof these days. We cover some insurance issues. There’s some good videos there that describe what we do. Probably in the next, I don’t know, four weeks, we’re going to start a subscription service. It’s going to be three-tiered. Tier three is going to be open in, I think, three to four weeks, fingers crossed. And you might be seeing us catch a deal or two here with maybe some insurance brokers we’ve been speaking to for the last couple of months. So check us out, securehotel.us, and reach out to us there.

Fred:

Well, Jeff, thank you so much for being on the Ontic Connected Intelligence Podcast. We really appreciate it.

Jeff:

Thanks for having me, Fred. I really appreciate you having me on.