When travelers take to the skies from Sea-Tac Airport, many leave their cares - and their cars - behind.

The community just east of the airport, the City of SeaTac, is the parking lot for travelers from all over Western Washington. On any given day, thousands of them are looking for a bargain - close-in parking at a low rate.

Hotels and motels along the International Boulevard strip entice travelers with parking specials and stay and fly packages.

One Holiday Inn offered a one night stay and five days parking for $160 when Jan McCrimmon planned a Florida vacation earlier this year.

"It sounded good to us," she said.

She was only gone a few days, when her family van was swiped from the hotel parking lot.

The alleged thief was a wanted man and drug user who was arrested after a stand-off with a Pierce County SWAT team.

McCrimmon's van was recovered, but she never thought she'd have this problem at a name-brand hotel.

"I thought, probably like most people, that it was a safe place to park your car," she said.

After McCrimmon's tip, the KING 5 Investigators obtained SeaTac crime reports on car thefts and prowls. We developed our own database to analyze where the thieves were striking. When we matched the crimes to addresses, a startling figure emerged.

Nearly 40 percent of all the city's car prowls and a quarter of all car thefts and attempted thefts occurred at a few hotels. In the past year, some of the most recognizable names in lodging have each had dozens of car thefts and break-ins on their lots.

We reviewed crime reports for one Ramada Inn and uncovered 139 car prowls and thefts, an average of a crime every four days, for the past year-and-a-half.

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On any given day, thousands of travelers look for bargain parking in the area just east of the Sea-Tac Airport.

Ramada management backed out of a scheduled on-camera interview so we took our findings right to the hotel's owner, a woman named Begum Steiner.

Steiner told us she's been working with police and just spent $10,000 on a new security camera system.

But are the cameras alone enough?

Scott Wagner has the tools of a car thief's trade and the know-how to defeat a car's door locks. Wagner's not a thief, he's a former cop who is now an insurance industry investigator.

He walked Ramada's lot at our request, spotting serious flaws, even with the hotel's new security cameras. 

"I particularly don't like the angle of the cameras and the fact that where the cameras are pointing all the lights are out in the parking lot," he said.

We counted more than half the lights burned out, and walked through Ramada's lot for more than an hour unchallenged, like the many thieves who came before us.

"It's totally black out here… nobody's going to see them," said Wagner.

Wagner says most of the hotels have open and accessible grounds, like one Super 8 lot, which is at the top the list for vehicles stolen, with 22 thefts or attempts in the past year from the darkened lot.

"This is heaven for the bad guys," said Wagner. "Bad guys love this right here."

And since many cars are parked for days or weeks, SeaTac offers car thieves a one-of-a-kind automobile buffet.

"They have a couple of weeks to joy ride, drug traffic, ship the vehicle out of the country, before anybody knows it's stolen," said Wagner.

No place is immune around SeaTac. Thieves struck the airport's parking garage 163 times last year. But the 26 hotels we reviewed had almost three times more crime, even though, combined, they have less than half the parking spaces that the airport does.

The half dozen "park and fly" lots outside the airport, which are generally more expensive and more secure, had just a handful of crimes.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the number of actual car prowls is much higher than what's reported," said Sgt. John Urquhart of the King County Sheriff's Office.

The Sheriffs Department, which provides SeaTac police service, says many tourists or weary travelers don't report the crimes, and some hotel owners are indifferent to concerns raised by police and the city.

"There's an awful lot of lots that have never upgraded their security at all, even though they know they have an ongoing problem with car prowls and car thefts," said Urquhart.

Parking stubs clearly state that customers are on the hook, but Jan McCrimmon thinks hotels owe their guests some measure of security, not just a parking space.

"Because I'm paying for that… that's what I paid for," she said.

There's truth here to that old saying "You get what you pay for." The Sea-Tac parking garage is $22 a day. Those secure park and ride lots could cost you $12-$15 per day. The Ramada we showed you was $10 a day. But you might want to put more than just cost into the equation.

So what should people look for when parking?

Police officers say the No. 1 crime deterrent is good lighting. Crooks don't want to be seen doing their dirty work. Make sure there are not only light posts, but lights that work.

Update:

Since our story aired in April, there have been 15 car prowls and three cars stolen at the SeaTac Ramada.