NEW YORK - People who worry about travelling and spending time in public places may be relieved to learn most US hotels are pretty safe places to be, a study by a Cornell University hospitality-industry expert finds. Hotels near airports offer the most safety and security features, with large hotels, luxury hotels of any size and new hotels also ranking high on the safety and security indexes devised by Cathy Enz, a professor at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration, and Masako Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate at the school. Enz, who is director of the Hotel School's Centre for Hospitality Research, said, "A significant proportion of the 2,123 hotels included in our study rated 85 percent or higher on our indexes, which looked at such features as security camera monitoring systems, secured corridors, electronic locks and sprinkler systems. That news is reassuring now that we're seeing a heightened concern among the general public about how safe we are in public buildings, including hotels," said Enz. The study is published at , the CHR web site. Hotel managers can actually take the survey online and measure their hotel's safety and security performance against that of the hotels in the study. In general, the newer the hotel, the higher its safety and security scores, the researchers found. "This is probably because electronic locks, sprinklers and interior corridors are relatively less common in older hotels than in hotels built in the last decade," said Enz. Luxury hotels are the exception, she noted. "Because they are renovated frequently, even the oldest ones are likely to have the latest safety and security features." Accordingly, after airport hotels, luxury and upscale hotels had the highest scores for safety and security. All-suite properties and convention hotels also scored high.