Nobody (or almost nobody) leaves a hotel room with one foot bare. It is from this banal certainty that a trick was born that has become viral among the most savvy travellers: the evening before check-out, to avoid forgetting something, you have to put a shoe in the safe together with your passport, cash and jewellery.
The viral trick on TikTok
The habit was made popular by Esther Sturrus, flight attendant for the Dutch company KLM and content creator, who shared it on TikTok among six tips designed for frequent travellers. The video has exceeded one million three hundred thousand views.
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The idea is not new, it was already circulating among frequent flyers, as told by the American travel blogger Johnny Jet, who had already talked about it in 2024.
How the psychological mechanism works
The mechanism is more psychological than technical, let’s see why. The safe, once closed, easily leaves the field of vision and therefore from memory, therefore you forget that you have left something inside precisely because you can no longer see it. The missing shoe, on the other hand, is impossible to ignore, it is immediately noticed as you put on your shoes to go out, and forces you to open the safe one last time before leaving the room. The trick should be applied the evening before departure, when you put away the last valuable object, and it only works if it becomes a systematic habit, repeated every stay and not just when you fear forgetting something.
Because checking out is the most risky moment
The advice especially concerns hotels with a safe in the room, where the risk of leaving objects inside is higher precisely because they are hidden from view, unlike an open suitcase on the bed. And check-out, after all, is one of the most chaotic moments of a trip: luggage to close, timetables to respect, your mind already focused on the next stage. In this confusion the mind willingly skips the less automatic controls, such as that of the safe. Creating an immediate, physical association, such as that between the missing shoe and the obligation to wear it, circumvents the problem without requiring any memory effort.
A trick that has gone viral several times
The trick has also found new popularity thanks to other creators, such as the cosmetics entrepreneur Hope Smith, who in a video says she forgot something in the safe to the point of forcing her assistant to return to Italy to retrieve it, as reported by Fox News.
