Hotel security expected to increase in short term after Las Vegas shooting, expert says

News 6 speaks with representative from Rosen School of Hospitality Management

ORLANDO, Fla. – In light of what happened in Las Vegas, now the site of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, News 6 wanted to find out how hotels and resorts here handle their security measures and policies.

We reached out to the Rosen School of Hospitality Management, which trains people to work for large hotels and resorts worldwide.

Dr. Kevin Murphy has been teaching here for the past 14 years and is the chairman of the Hospitality Department. He says while he expects security to increase in the short term, he does not anticipate big changes in the long-term.

He also says there is little that could have been done to predict or prevent what he calls this kind of lone-wolf attack.

"Hotels obviously have security and the larger the hotel, the more security it has and there are lots of precautions that hotels can take if they are in a high risk situations," Murphy said. "I just had a discussion with a manager of a large hotel chain and he said they will have increased security for the time being but didn't know how it would be long term."

Murphy says while the higher rise hotels may have larger and more unique security factors to consider, all hotels have security cameras both outside and inside the buildings. But he doubts they will ever be installed inside guest rooms, even after what happened inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, where Stephen Paddock checked in last Thursday.

Paddock is accused of having 23 guns inside the suite and then firing into a crowd of 22,000 Sunday during the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival. Paddock killed 59 people and injured 527 more.

"Overseas and in some high-risk countries they have high security that screens everybody coming into the hotel but that's not the case with a country like the United States that is as big as it is and has so much tourism," Murphy said. "Orlando has 100,000-120,000 hotel rooms and to try to protect all those hotel properties and all those situations would just be an enormous undertaking."


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