Room intrusions were reported at nearly one in 10 Travelodge hotels this summer, and the chain had no policy in place on violence against women and girls, according to a review conducted by barrister Paul Greaney KC.

The figure anchors a report that Travelodge — headquartered in Thame, Oxfordshire — said it welcomes, with changes under way since March. The review followed sustained BBC reporting that began with the case of a woman who woke up to a man sexually assaulting her in her bed at the chain's Maidenhead branch in December 2022, after staff gave him a key card and her room number.

Wendy Griffith, a marketing consultant from Norfolk, was one of dozens of people who shared accounts with the BBC after that report. She was staying at Travelodge London Stratford in July 2025 when a man — also a hotel guest — banged on her door and performed sex acts in the corridor, which she witnessed through the peephole.

Griffith described "rising panic" over an hour in which she was "essentially trapped" in the middle of the night. Her room had no phone and no emergency contact number. She tried multiple times to reach staff, then called the Travelodge website number from her mobile before dialling 999 in desperation.

She later learned that during a lull in that hour, the man had gone to reception and asked for a replacement room key. Staff gave him her room number instead of his own — the same operational failure that enabled the Maidenhead assault.

The man, Trevor Reece, 40, pleaded guilty to outraging public decency in September 2025. Magistrates sentenced him to four months of alcohol dependency treatment and ordered him to pay £185 in court costs and £50 compensation to his victim, which Griffith says remains unpaid.

The review's operational findings

Greaney's review found no Travelodge policy on violence against women and girls. Interim chief executive Ray Reidy told the BBC the company is now working with the personal safety charity Suzy Lamplugh Trust to develop one.

In its formal response to the review, Travelodge said: "Travelodge would like to unreservedly apologise again to the woman assaulted and to all guests where Travelodge has fallen short due to failures in its policies and procedures for room access security and in its response to complaints."

Griffith called the review "quite emotional to read" and "galling".

"There's validation in it, but there's also real sadness and frustration that women had to go through these experiences before the issues were taken this seriously," she said. "It's terrible to think that it's just taken years and years for this to come to life and such serious incidences for people to realise what's been going on and how companies like Travelodge have been behaving."

An industry-wide gap in front-desk protocol

Security specialists say the failure at issue is procedural and common across the sector, not unique to one chain.

Carolyn Pearson, CEO of travel security company Maiden Voyage, called handing a room key to someone claiming to be a guest's boyfriend an "incredibly basic" failure — but one that is "unfortunately very common across the industry".

"This is not just a Travelodge issue," she said. Hotels, she added, "should never ever confirm whether or not a guest is staying at the hotel or not."

Dawn Brennan, CEO of women's safety charity Wise Women, said: "We would say that no one should be getting access to any rooms unless they're registered and also provide an ID. But even further than that considering women's safety, the hotel should have policies in place where they double check as well if it's a partner that's coming to the reception and they don't have the key."

Under current UK law, responsibility for guest safety rests primarily with the hotel and its management. Each hotel or chain sets its own security policy, which staff are expected to follow — meaning key-release and ID-verification standards vary by operator.

Pressure for national standards

Griffith has set up a petition calling on the government to implement minimum safety and guest security standards across all UK hotels. She said she believed security failures were an "industry-wide problem" and wants the review's lessons to extend beyond one chain.

"What has kept me speaking up about this is the fact that so many people have been affected, in particular women, and something positive has to come from these incidences," she said. "A locked hotel room should mean exactly that. Locked, safe, yours."

Travelodge's work with the Suzy Lamplugh Trust on a formal violence-against-women policy, alongside the room-access procedure changes under way since March, will provide the first test of whether the review's one-in-ten finding becomes a turning point or a statistic.