I have heard that it is ok to leave your hardcopy passport in your hotel room if there is not a hotel safe and to just cary a photocopy. If this is true, does anyone have suggestsions as to where to hide it? Assuming i dont have a secret compartment in my luggage. Lol

I leave my passport simply tucked somewhere in my suitcase, then I zip my suitcase shut.

Others here on Fodors insist that passport theft from hotel rooms is a real risk and insist on carrying it on them in a money belt.

I keep mine in a pocket folder with lots of other vacation papers - brochures, notes, ticket stubs, etc. I also keep my spare money there. If you open the folder it looks like a bunch of tourist info.

ya but my mom would probably freak if i suggested that haha

There is no real need to hide your passport -- just stick it in your luggage, in a pocket of a jacket left in a closet, etc.. You are much more likely to lose it if you carry it. I base this observation on years of consular work.

Some people here suffer under the misapprehension that the passport is your citizenship. It is not. It is merely a document attesting to your citizenship and can be replaced if lost or stolen, both of which are less likely to happen if you leave it in your hotel room.

I carry my passport with me at all times. If anything happens to it I want to know immediately - not find out when I only have a few hours to get out of town. (And in almost 80 trips of carrying it with me - nothing has ever happened.)

All I can say is that in years on consular work, I never had to replace the passport of someone who had left it in their hotel room. During the same period I replaced dozens of passports people had carried on their person and which subsequently "went missing." My conclusion: leave your passport in the hotel.

If you're really determined to hide your passport you should do what I've seen in spy films. Put it in a zip lock baggie and tape it to the back of the armoir or the bottom of the dresser or TV stand. Don't forget where you've put it! Of course if I were a thief that's the first place I'd look.

And then, Adrienne, you would forget to retrieve it before you left for the airport!

I carry mine with me at all times. Never lost it. Always have a copy of it in my luggage back at the hotel, sometimes more than one copy of it.

Like nytraveler, I carry my passport with me at all times. Never lost or stolen in more than 40 years of travelling. I've always preferred the comfort of knowing I could just leave a place on a moment's notice if I thought it was prudent for my safety. I don't even like hotel personnel keeping my passport for any amount of time when checking in!

We just stick ours in our suitcases in one of the pouches, do the suitcase up and then stack them on top of one another. So far so good...but then we usually stay in B&B's and not hotels.

It is interesting how often we (myself included) ignore real data like that provided by Fra_Diavolo in favor of anecdote or feelings.

In some countries, the law is that you carry the real thing and not a copy. A few years ago, a brawl broke out at one of the Irish pubs in Brussels and the police had to come. Even the innocent bystanders had to produce their ID and those who didn't have it either were given a hard time by the police or not allowed to leave until they arranged for someone to bring their real ID to the pub.

We carry our UK drivers licenses as ID and generally only travel in Europe at the moment.