Hello Ash:

I've been touring Europe for between 6 and 8 weeks every summer for the past 10 years. I always stay at hotels. I've never had any cause to worry about the security of my motorcycle.

I stay at all sorts of hotels, ranging from €40 to €400 a night. I really don't think that security - or the procedures one follows to find a secure parking place - varies all that much regardless of the price of the hotel.

When I arrive at the hotel, I ask the reception staff where the best (most secure) place to park the bike is. The reception staff will always give you a good answer, an honest answer. Often, they will suggest an 'out of sight' location such as in the back yard, or inside a small garage where they store garden supplies, that kind of place. If the staff don't have any good ideas, I will ask if I can park the bike within sight of the front door. 99% of the time this request is approved.

I have a Honda ST1100 (a PanEuropean) - it is a large, heavy motorcycle, 300 kg, hence it would be difficult to steal without raising a fuss. I remove my GPS from the handlebars, and take into the hotel the items I want to have with me (clothes, toilet supplies, tablet computer), but I don't make any special effort to empty out the moto, nor do I go to the trouble of emptying out the little (non-lockable) compartments in the front fairing.

I have a very robust Kryptonite cable & padlock, but I only use it about 10% of the time - typically, only if I am in a port city in a questionable country (Romania, Ukraine, Albania, far eastern Poland). If I do decide to lock the bike up, I attach the frame & rear wheel to a fixed object like a lamp pole.

Best advice I can give you based on all my experience is to either put the bike somewhere where it is well out of sight (in the back yard, in the garden shed, inside a garage, etc.), or; put it in the most visible location you can find (near the front door).

If you elect to stay at smaller hotels or pensions, you will probably find that the owners will offer you the possibility of storing your bike in their own personal garage.

Basically, unless your bike is something that just cries out to be stolen (like a heavily customized Harley-Davidson, for example), I don't think you have much to worry about.

Michael

PS: For goodness sake, don't stay at low-end ratholes like F1 or Etap. Life's too short to put up with that kind of suffering. For the same price, you will be able to find a pension, or a really good restaurant that happens to have a few rooms upstairs, and stay there instead. If you have not done so already, get a little app called 'TripAdvisor' and put it on your phone, use it to find the pleasant, smaller, non-chain hotels to stay in.

Ha Ha. That just about sums them up. They really are the fast food of the hotel world. Many many times given a choice between a night in an Etap and camping I've paid the same money in a decent campsite and been happy with the decision. I've turned up at an F1 (with my family) to be greeted at the entrance by the police with someone sprawled over the bonnet of their car and being handcuffed, and another (Etap this time) where I was woken up in the middle of the night by gunfire. Somewhere I have a picture taken from the room window of an F1 where the view is straight over a scrap yard. That's one place where I didn't park the bike under the window.

Both those chains have gone increasingly downmarket over the last decade or so, particularly as the buildings etc have aged. F1 is now almost unusable even for an arrive at midnight, leave at 6.00am overnight stop and the low price is pretty much irrelevant. Out of the tourist season Etaps are where white van man spends the night. We stayed in one where only vehicles in the car park were half a dozen (white) minibuses. Next morning we watched as the rooms emptied and the vans filled up with French riot police.

Like fast food they are just easy to use when you've spent a day on the road and your brain no longer functions. They may be really low end but at least you know what you're getting and usually they're easy to find - just head for the industrial estate. I still use them (Etaps anyway) but just for transit stops where I'm too tired to be sociable. It's a bit like pulling in for fuel on the motorway, simple and impersonal. Just do what you have to and get on your way.

Any advice on what the equivalent North American chains would be so I can avoid them when I'm over there later in the year.