Three Baghdad hotels were bombed in rapid-fire order Monday, and at least 36 people died. That press reports from the scene still can't accurately name the hotels or give a final tally for the dead is chilling enough, of course, but Monday's violence should also serve as a wake-up call for business travelers: Nothing we know or believe about hotel safety is valid anymore.

Talking heads like me are supposed to dispense sage advice in times of peril. We're supposed to coolly survey the literal and figurative wreckage, summon up decades of experience, and tap into expert sources to give you five or 15 or 50 ways to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

But never has the conventional wisdom made less sense or seemed more unwise. Every good notion about how to travel in a dangerous (or even just an unfamiliar) place is refuted by a new attack or a contradictory bit of advice. It's my job to bring order to this chaos, but believe me when I tell you that the chaos has consumed any notion of order.

Rather than make believe I have answers and sage advice, let's take a hard look at some of the old truths, examine how they've been debunked, and try to figure out if there is anything useful we can learn for the future.

The Stick-to-Big-Brands Strategy

One oft-repeated truth in the past has been to suggest that business travelers are better off lodging at big, international hotels. The assumption has been that the big chains with worldwide networks have the best security, best understand the reasons why that security is necessary, and work most diligently to shield and secure at-risk international guests.

The problem with that assumption now is that the terrorists know it too. Many attacks in recent years (at a Marriott in Islamabad and on the Taj Mahal Palace and Oberoi hotels in Mumbai in 2008) have targeted big and well-known business-travel spots specifically because they were large and run by chains with international profiles. They are inviting "soft" targets because they aren't as difficult to attack as airlines but will generate almost as much worldwide press. After all, bombing a no-name hotel isn't quite as spectacular (or newsworthy) as successfully attacking a local outpost of a globally known and respected lodging icon.

But advising business travelers to stay at smaller, less conspicuous, less globally identifiable places entails its own risk. Security is lax or nonexistent, foreigners are more likely to stand out, and international business travelers are the easiest to identify. Besides, these places offer fewer on-the-ground services, thus increasing the likelihood that business travelers must wander into unsafe and dangerous neighborhoods for meals and transportation.

The Locals-Know-Best Strategy

Experienced business travelers have always been justifiably skeptical of advice from their corporate travel departments or third-party security firms who peddle "intelligence." Smart travelers have more often relied on their local networks of contacts or in situ employees of their firms or clients. Their reasoning is simple: Locals know the terrain best and usually have more nuanced and tactical details of on-the-grounds problems.

The obvious flaw in that rationale: Locals don't always know best. That was proven again by Monday's attacks in Baghdad. Media reports stating the bombed hotels were the Sheraton, Meridien, and Oberoi were based on what the locals call currently the properties. But none of those hotels have been part of those global franchises for years. (In the case of the supposed Sheraton Ishtar, not coincidentally Baghdad's tallest building, Sheraton revoked its franchise after the property was seized by Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War in 1991.) Yet either out of ignorance or sloppiness, locals continue to call the hotels by their old brand names, which misleads visiting business travelers to overrate and misperceive the level of safety and quality of security the properties currently provide.