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You could forgive some hotel managers if there are times they think about renaming their properties The Larceny Arms.

Throughout history, hotels and inns have been plagued with sticky-fingered guests who carry away a remarkable array of property not included in the price of their rooms. And, not much has changed.

Take Toronto's Holiday Inn on King St., for example. When it opened its doors seven years ago, it became an occasional overnight stop for the crew of a foreign airline that flew into Pearson Airport.

"I won't say which airline," says the hotel's general manager, Marlin Keranen, "and they don't stay here anymore, but I swear these people arrived with empty suitcases and made off with everything that wasn't nailed down.

"I'm not exaggerating," he said. "They would order room-service meals and when we'd go up to clean the room the next morning there was nothing left but the tray. They took all the china, the glasses and the silverware. Sometimes they would take the pillowcases and the sheets and make the beds up with just the bedspread.

"It got to the point where we started taking the food up in take-out containers with plastic spoons and forks. Everything that wasn't bolted down was gone."

A bar of soap, a pen, the shampoo, the sewing kit, and maybe even the shoe-polishing cloth -- most hotel guests will admit to pocketing these at one time or other. But many, it seems, don't stop at these tokens of a pleasant stay. They take everything from doors, bedding, TVs, portable phones and wall hangings to draperies and tap handles. In exchange, they often leave behind a bazaar of the bizarre.

And larcenous travellers, who have been hunting and foraging in hotels for centuries, have taken their sticky fingers to the air. Airlines are routinely divested of everything from cutlery and china to seat belts and life jackets.

According to the American Hotel and Motel Association, theft cost U.S. hotels more than $100-million (U.S.) last year, a cost that is inevitably passed along with increased room rates. And people steal whether they're in economy motel rooms or $400-a-night New York suites. Workers at Super 8 Motels say batteries from TV remote controls, alarm clocks and smoke detectors are routinely taken. The Breakers in Palm Beach once lost a $75,000 tapestry.

Where magazine, an international city guide, surveyed hotels in 11 U.S. and European cities in 1999 and found that the top items taken from hotel rooms were towels, soap, shampoo, bathrobes, hangers and ashtrays. There were inexplicable regional differences. Towels are swiped most often in Los Angeles, bathrobes disappear most frequently in New York, bed linens in Las Vegas, and ashtrays in Paris.

But some guests are not content with the usual items. Someone carried away a two-metre-tall fiscus tree from the lobby of the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas; others made off with a sink from the Crowne Plaza and a closet safety-deposit box from the Essex House in New York; kettles and teapots disappear from London's Marriott County Hall; a guest took a permanent liking to a recliner chair at the Drury Inn Westport in St. Louis.

John O'Carroll, the London Inter-Continental's general manager said that when running a five-star hotel you come to expect certain items to disappear, but there are always surprises. "We have seen an entire door go missing," he said. "The ceramic hot and cold tops from our Victorian taps proved very popular, as did the beautifully framed paintings displayed in our restrooms."

At the Hotel Inter-Continental in Paris, a porter actually carried a television set in a duffel bag to a hotel guest's car.

Another survey, conducted by Business Traveller magazine, found that three-quarters of business travellers admit to stealing from hotel rooms. While most restrict their foraging to toiletries and stationery, 9 per cent admitted to purloining hangers, 5 per cent to nicking ashtrays, and 2 per cent to packing those fluffy hotel-owned bathrobes.

"When people check into a hotel, they do things they would never do at home," says Richard Millard, president of Tecton Hospitality, a Miami-based hotel management firm. "People who don't drink get drunk. The faithful husband cheats. And the most honest people steal."

Millard suspects that people feel they are invisible in a hotel, so they're not accountable. And they feel a sense of entitlement. After all, they're paying $300 a night for a room, so there's nothing wrong with lifting a few towels.

That sort of thinking can go too far. The manager of the Fontainbleau Hilton in Miami Beach tells of one guest who packed all his belongings into a dresser, taped the drawers shut and called for the bellman to pick it up. The bellman politely explained that the dresser must stay with the room. The guest was insulted.

Six months ago, the Holiday Inn in Toronto added hand-held phones to its rooms.

"Of course, as soon as we put those in, two of them disappeared," said Keranen. "They took the charger and the phone out the door with them. We did manage to track one of them down. It turned out to be a band member who was on the road and decided it would be nice to have one with him."

The group's leader made him return it.

And it appears that guests come up with ingenious tactics to pilfer the smallest things.

Keranen said he has had groups of people in hotel rooms who kept calling down for more towels. "At first, we didn't collect the dirty ones when the fresh ones were delivered. Then we discovered that when we went to clean the room, there were only the original number of towels left. It seems that when some people found they had more than the original count, they felt free to take the surplus."

But Danny Crowell, general manager of the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald in Edmonton, has a tale of redemption, or perhaps just ancestral guilt. When Canadian Pacific bought the 73-year-old Hotel Macdonald in 1988, it had been stripped bare of most of its original heritage items. When CP reopened the refurbished hotel, it placed ads in Alberta newspapers announcing an amnesty period during which people could bring back items lifted over the decades.

"We were astounded by the results," said Crowell. "A ton of stuff was returned -- everything from silver platters to silver coffee urns and complete silver tea sets that had been pilfered over the years and probably passed down through families."

Patrick Kelly, general manager of the Hotel Vancouver, said that at least one guest took a liking to a print of an urn hanging above the bed.

"They took the picture down, removed the print and replaced it with a picture they cut out of a magazine. By the time we noticed it was missing, we didn't know who to go after."

Most hotel managers admit they don't usually pursue the loss of small items, afraid to confront regular clients and lose their business. Guests who take things like bathrobes will usually find the item's cost added to their charge accounts.

Or they'll get a phone call, like the little old lady who came through the Hotel Macdonald with a tour group and completely emptied the minibar. When contacted and told she would have to pay about $200, she immediately sent back every bottle by courier. She thought they came free with the room.

Some hotels put discreet price tags on removable room items and encourage guests to purchase souvenirs. Others are removing their logos from room items to discourage souvenir hunters.

Major theft, of course, is a different matter. One of the most remarkable hotel heists by a guest took place in 1994 at the five-diamond Palm Beach Breakers. A visitor snatched an 18th-century, silk-and-wool tapestry worth $75,000 (U.S.) that was hanging four metres up on the wall of a meeting room. Three months later, the tapestry was recovered from a bus-station locker and a New York man was sentenced to 33 months in prison. The tapestry is back at the hotel and now has a tiny alarm fastened to it.

If some guests are brazen about what they steal, they're casual about what they leave behind.

Hotels surveyed by Where magazine reported that the most commonly left items included clothes, shoes, underwear, cell phones and toiletries. But there is also a sprinkling of the bizarre.

Sexual paraphernalia ranked first overall in the "unusual" group, according to Steven Flans, the magazine's research director.

"This category was most popular in the Midwest [U.S.], with 70 per cent of St. Louis hotels reporting this in their lost and found, followed by 50 per cent of Chicago respondents."

Regional peculiarities continued in survey results. In Las Vegas, there were as many dentures as sex toys found by housekeeping. In Los Angeles, hotels have counted iguanas, bags of marijuana and empty vials of Viagra among their most unusual found items. A wedding gown was left behind in a hotel room in Dallas, weapons in Scottsdale, and human eyes in New York.

The results from hotels surveyed in London showed they had much in common with their midwestern-U.S. bretheren: 70 per cent surveyed also discovered sexual devices in their rooms. In fact, a guest at One Aldwych was bold enough to leave a whip behind, and later ask that it be returned to him.

Hotel Vancouver's Patrick Kelly said that on a recent tour through his lost-and-found room he found crutches and a wheelchair.

"Now you've got to wonder about that," he said. "People arrive lame and apparently leave cured. It could lead you to believe your rooms have miraculous powers."