To people from better off part of the world, luxury hotels in third-world countries are, almost as a rule, a magnet for trouble: petty crimes, robberies, encounters with mafia, and, as was in that case, an armed assault.
This isn't true at all. Luxury hotels, most especially managed or chain brands are some of the safest places in third-world countries.
The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and high-end clients.
They have the best security and are usually located in prime areas making them less susceptible to some of those claims you made.
And they also have a brand to protect. Except they are very expensive relative to the cost of living of those countries but their target market is foreigners, short-stay expats and government delegations so they still get patronized.
Yeah, you have two choices -- either a high-end international-clientele hotel which also has security, or something relatively anonymous. The other two quadrants (high profile international hotel with no security, or a low-profile guesthouse with a lot of western guests and lots of local information about it) are how to get killed most efficiently.
Big hard property means you'll probably be safe from petty crime, but you might be collateral damage during a large terrorist attack. However, most places can repel the smaller attacks.
Smaller/anonymous property means you won't be collateral damage from anyone else, but it will be a whole lot easier for someone to learn "rich American/European is staying in this guesthouse" and then do a trivial attack. You have to be consistent with this, using local vehicles, probably not going out much, etc.
Depends on the situation which is better (the external situation as well as who you are as a target). A big factor is that K&R/institutional policies/etc. do not permit the low profile approach. If you're living in a low profile place but then taking a big armored truck to/from meetings with the government at hardened sites, you're probably going to have a bad time, too.
I'd personally feel weird being in Afghanistan or Iraq without a weapon (and possibly security detail) today, despite it being "safer" than when I was there, and having illegal weapons being itself an actual risk now. I solve this by just not going.
Most of the third world isn't actual-warzone and you're not as likely to face a huge terrorist attack on the biggest target. The Kenyan mall/etc. attacks are outliers. I'd generally go for the hardened strategy myself, as I don't want to have to go through the trouble of blending in, especially on a longer basis.
(In a high threat environment I'd probably go for my own secured compound somewhere, just so I wouldn't be collateral damage, but that requires you be able to hold/secure the compound, which puts a pretty high minimum scale to be economic. I lived in a villa in Baghdad with Kurdish security, and then in Afghanistan I stayed at a guest house with a 2:1 rifle to guest ratio, but yeah.)
This is what most Westerner think, but the reality is the opposite.
I'll explain.
Luxury hotels in 3rd world countries are very different from normal hotels. They are "hotels" in name only.
Here, luxury hotels function pretty much like castles and keeps for local "feudal elites." What they do is not so much about providing lodging and comfort, but providing physical security and security from sights of common people to local rich and powerful.
You are totally right that such places are well secured, some even with security walls, barbed wire, and armed guards. But the very fact that such establishments tend to host "walking money bags," or people justly hated by local populace is the reason why troubles haunt them.
That infamous Ritz Carlton in Moscow near Kremlin certainly saw over 20 murders, and god knows how many other violent crimes. A Marriott nearby fared not much better.
> The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and high-end clients.
Such things happen near weekly, no matter how much security is posted on premises. This is really counterintuitive to a person from the West. How to say that... if hotel you are staying in is the only place in the city where burglars and pickpockets can steal anything of value, it will be targeted invariably of the amount of deterrent https://www.google.com/search?q=%22presidential+suite%22+bur...
I spent a year as "nomad" traveling the world. A friend of mine who works for the State Department told me to always "stay where other Americans aren't."
I think no matter where you travel if you're seen to be a tourist some people will see you as a "target" for petty crime of opportunity like pickpocketing. But in some countries being an American could make you the target of a violent crime committed by a political/ideological extremist. When I was in Marseille, for example, several American students studying abroad were the target of an acid attack.
I suppose the thinking goes that if one American is a potential target for an opportunistic violent extremist than a place that's frequently host to groups of Americans is perhaps more likely to be a target for a coordinated attack.
It might or might not be true but for the most part it wasn't particularly difficult to avoid my fellow Americans while traveling anyway. We tend to take business trips abroad but not many weeks-long exploratory vacations. Plus, you can't really get much of a feel for the country you're in from a Hilton now can you?
Edit: To add that I don't want to be fear-mongering. I think a lot of my friends and family thought I was taking a "risk" by traveling to some of the countries I went to and for the most part I felt just as safe in the Middle East as I did in New Orleans. I don't think fear should stop anyone from traveling but I also think it's wise to be mindful of some of the unfortunate realities of the world in which we live.
I have no other way of discussing this further since that comment is too down the page for me to expect you to see replies to- but what would be a good "front-end framework" according to you? And if I may ask- what do you use?
Well, on that... I will chose Vue for something relatively undemanding just for the sake of convenience, and availability of devs. For something more performance critical, S.js + surplus looks to me the best library around today that provides lightweight data binding, templating and reactivity without feature bloat.
Thank you- I do care a lot about performance. About S.js, wow, that does look amazingly simple- just my type. I went through your comments (sorry if that's not appropriate) and it seemed to me that you're mostly into electronics. But your comment about js seemed well-informed after some other research I did. So thanks a lot, I'm surprised that I never learned this before.
The odds of buglary, petty crimes and those vices you listed happening is close to zero. This is the reason why they are attractive to expats and high-end clients.
They have the best security and are usually located in prime areas making them less susceptible to some of those claims you made.
And they also have a brand to protect. Except they are very expensive relative to the cost of living of those countries but their target market is foreigners, short-stay expats and government delegations so they still get patronized.