How to check a hotel room

Everything else in this guide is detail on that answer: which objects, in what order, and what the phone in your pocket can and cannot add. Do the visual pass first. Tools narrow down where to look; they do not replace looking.

The inspection route

Work in a consistent order so you do not lose track of what you have already covered. Start at the door, move clockwise around the walls, then do the ceiling, then the bathroom.

1. Entry and light switches. Look at the door viewer from the inside, the light switch plates, and the thermostat. You are looking for anything that does not sit flush, a hole that has no obvious function, or a plate that looks newer than everything around it.
2. Sockets, adapters and chargers. Examine every plug socket and anything left plugged into one — USB chargers, extension leads, plug-in air fresheners. A charger you did not bring, in a room where a charger has no reason to be, is worth a second look. Compare it with the others in the room: they usually match.
3. The bedside area. Alarm clocks and clock radios face the bed by design, which puts them on any inspection list. Check the front face carefully, particularly any dark panel, speaker grille or unexplained small aperture.
4. The television and anything attached to it. Look at the bezel, the top edge, and any streaming stick, set-top box or soundbar. These sit at eye level pointing at the bed and are already full of electronics, so an extra component is easy to overlook.
5. Decorative objects. Picture frames, artificial plants, tissue-box covers, ornaments on a shelf, books, a Bluetooth speaker. Anything whose position seems oddly deliberate, especially if it is angled towards the bed rather than sitting square to the furniture.
6. Air vents and grilles. Look through them from an angle rather than straight on. Slats hide a lot when viewed head-on and much less when viewed from the side. Do not remove the cover.
7. Smoke detectors and ceiling fittings. A smoke detector directly above or beside the bed, rather than centrally in the ceiling or near the door, is unusual placement worth noticing. Look at it from below and from an angle. Sprinkler heads, ceiling speakers and downlight housings deserve the same glance.
8. The bathroom. Repeat the same logic: anything with a view of the shower or the sink. Shower fittings, toiletry shelves, extractor vents, the underside of shelving, and any object that has been left behind.
9. Mirrors. Covered separately below.
10. Second pass in the dark. Turn off the lights, close the curtains, let your eyes adjust for a minute or two, and look around for small points of light. Many devices have a status LED that is invisible in daylight.

How to check a mirror

The concern with a mirror is that it is two-way: reflective on your side, transparent from a darkened space behind. This is rare in hotels, where mirrors are usually mounted directly on solid walls, but it is quick to check.

1. Look at how the mirror is mounted. A mirror sitting flat against a wall, with a visible frame edge and no gap behind it, has nowhere for a room to be.
2. Put a fingertip against the glass surface. On an ordinary mirror the reflection of your fingertip appears to have a small gap from your finger, because the reflective coating sits behind the thickness of the glass. On glass silvered on the front surface, the reflection meets your finger directly. This is a hint, not a test — glass thickness and coating type vary, so a surprising result means look further, not that you have found something.
3. Cup your hands around your eyes against the glass and block out the room light. If there is a lit space behind the mirror you will often see it. A uniformly dark result is the normal one.
4. Knock gently. A mirror on a solid wall sounds dull and dead; one over a cavity sounds hollow. Walls have cavities too, so treat this as one more weak signal.

None of these four checks is conclusive on its own. Taken together with the mounting and the room layout, they usually settle the question in under a minute.

Lighting conditions

You need two different lighting conditions, and they find different things.

Do both. The bright pass finds glass; the dark pass finds power.

About network scanning in hotels

Plainly: on most hotel Wi-Fi, a network scan will show you almost nothing, and that result means almost nothing.

Hotel networks nearly always run client isolation, which stops guests from reaching one another's devices. That is a sensible security measure — it protects your laptop from every other guest — but it also means a scan cannot reach a camera on the same network. An empty scan on a hotel network is the expected outcome, not a clean bill of health.

Hotels commonly run separate networks for staff and building systems as well, and anything on those is invisible to you regardless. So is any device recording to a memory card with no network connection at all, and anything using a mobile data connection.

What Findy can help with

Findy is an inspection aid. In a hotel room it can contribute in four ways:

• The guided checklist keeps you to an order and stops you forgetting the bathroom vent because you spent six minutes on the alarm clock. Free.
• The Bluetooth scanner lists devices advertising nearby with an estimated distance and a direction arrow derived from signal strength, which should improve as you walk towards the source. Useful for locating an unexplained device you can hear but not see. Free.
• Magnetic field checks let you compare one specific object against a baseline you take away from electronics — helpful when you want to know whether a decorative object contains more hardware than it should. Free.
• The camera tools — lens-glint finding, automatic lens scanning and an infrared viewing mode — make reflections and light sources easier to notice than by eye alone. These require the subscription, $39.99 per year in the US.

What Findy cannot determine

None of the above identifies a camera. Specifically, Findy cannot:

• Confirm that any object is or is not a recording device. It surfaces things worth examining; the conclusion is always yours, from looking at the object.
• See a powered-off device of any kind.
• See a wired camera with no network presence, or one recording to a local memory card.
• See anything on a different network — including, in a hotel, essentially everything.
• See a device connected over mobile data.
• Detect a purely passive microphone. A microphone that only records to storage emits nothing to detect.
• See a Bluetooth device that is powered off, not advertising, shielded, or out of range.
• Tell you where a Bluetooth device actually is. Findy estimates a distance and shows a direction arrow, but both are derived from signal strength alone. Treat them as "warmer or colder" while you move, not as a measurement — walls, bodies and orientation distort the reading badly.
• Distinguish a lens reflection from a polished screw head, a glossy plastic dome or an LED lens. That distinction is made by your eyes at close range.

The honest summary: a careful visual pass finds more than any scan, and a device that defeats every method described here can still exist. Full limitations.

If you find something

Related guides

• How to check a holiday rental — how the same inspection changes when you are on the host's own network.
• How camera lens reflections work — why the torch trick works, and why so many ordinary objects trigger it.
• Can an iPhone detect infrared? — what the dark-room pass can and cannot pick up.
• How Findy works — the technical detail behind each method.