“If you are visiting another country for business purposes, you may want to know if your clients’ or others are operating clandestine espionage, including gaining access to your electronics and bugging your room.’”īugging hotel rooms is nothing new. “If you are conducting espionage and are an unregistered agent in a country, you can be tried and sentenced,” he says. These days, business espionage is most common, and likely to take place in China, according to Angleton. Once in a while, an intelligence agency will contact the hotel manager formally and request assistance, but never expose what they are doing.” Jim Angleton, president and CEO of AEGIS FinServ Corp, adds that “an intelligence community might have someone gain access to the room by paying off a front desk person, who tells them - for money - which room a target or suspect is staying in. While the hotel itself might not be the one to bug a room, a nefarious employee, hotel worker, investigator, or government agency would have their reasons - legal, military, insurance, espionage, business, and financial, among others, says Jurist. And there are plenty of reasons why you might be the target. “Security and safety are easily at risk anytime you enter a space where somebody else has had access prior to your arrival,” says Jeffrey Jurist, President of. But if you’re heading to countries like China, Russia, Israel, or even the U.K., you might have another major issue: bugged hotel rooms. Lost luggage, missed connections, and flight delays are some of the common concerns that plague nervous travelers.