I don't even see a loophole here. You don't want to make hotels surf r unlimited liability for a guest's belongings. You don't want to bankrupt a hotel just because a guest carelessly left the Hope diamond, or the Koh-i-noor, in their luggage. Buy traveller's insurance if your luggage is worth more than the maximum; it's readily available, fairly inexpensive, and covers exactly this situation.

> You don’t want to make hotels surf r unlimited liability for a guest’s belongings.

Why not, within the otherwise generally-applicable rules of tort liability? Capping liability for failures to meet the expected duty of care encourages failure to meet the expected duty of care.

Why should a negligent hotelier be any less liable for the harms they cause through their negligence than any other negligent actor?

(Certainly, if there is a cause for a limit, it shouldn’t be less than the cost of decent new valise for each valise and its contents, and capped at 4 times that per guest; were I to suggest a limit, I’d probably do it per room, and have it be something like 10 times the maximum daily rate from the posted room rates required by Civil Code Section 1863; I’d probably also reverse the consent requirement, so that presumptively there would be unlimited liability, but the guest could consent in writing to the reduced liability. Since the hotelier is a merchant in a particular line of businesss, it is much fairer to assume that they have notice of the special legal conditions applicable to liability in that line than the guest, so the default conditions should favor the guest, with the written notice and affirmative consent required to alter it.)

> I’d probably also reverse the consent requirement, so that presumptively there would be unlimited liability, but the guest could consent in writing to the reduced liability.

That’s not meaningfully different from what we have now. With no specified minimum, the contract for every hotel will simply specify that the hotel has _no_ liability at all. If you specify a minimum, then every contract will specify that they have the minimum liability. Unless the hotel can make the amount of liability that they accept legible to potential customers (ie, it becomes something that they brag about in their advertising and that customers shop around for), then there is no financial incentive to do more than the minimum. Which is exactly the situation we are already in.

One alternative would be to leave the hotel’s liability uncapped but then allow them to decline to rent rooms to guests with expensive belongings, or require their guests to have separate insurance, or whatever. Realistically the only difference between this and our current situation is that we don’t have to answer so many impertinent questions during check–in; the hotel just assumes that you have either insured your belongings or kept them to a minimum.

> With no specified minimum

I both provided a proposed limit, and proposed reversing the consent so instead of “statutory limit is default, but hotel can consent in writing to a higher limit” the rule is “normal unlimited liability is the default, guest can consent in writing to a liability limit not less than 10 times the legal room rate”.

But as I said, no hotel would ever propose going above that minimum, so all you’ve done is change “$1000” to “10× the room rate”. That’s not a substantive change; it’s still an arbitrary number, customers still have to decide whether to get travel insurance or forgo it, etc. I doubt it even changes anything for most people, since most people don’t carry thousands of dollars of luggage with them and cheap hotel rooms are less than $100 a night.