It’s 2 AM and you stumble back to your hotel after a long day of sightseeing, drinking with the locals, and trying to practice your language skills. You’re ready to collapse into bed and turn your hotel room into a mess. You slide your key card into the lock and… nothing. Red light. Okay, let’s try again. Still nothing.
Just like you, we’ve been in this annoying position so many times. Well, it’s time to go to the front desk and see if you can get a new hotel key card. But you’re probably wondering what the hell happened between when you left the room this morning and right now.
Hotels Use Cheap Magnetic Strips That Fail Easily
Most hotels use low coercivity (LoCo) magnetic key cards, which are designed for short term use and cost less than the high coercivity cards that your credit cards use. LoCo cards have magnetic fields that are considerably weaker than HiCo ones, making them incredibly easy to accidentally erase.
Your hotel key card can get demagnetized just from sitting in your wallet next to credit cards, being near your phone, or coming into contact with the magnetic clasp on a purse. In short, everything around you can demagnetize the cheap piece of plastic that you’ve been carrying with you all day. Heck, even placing it on a table near a TV or camera can wipe the data. Hotels know this happens constantly, but they stick with LoCo cards because they’re cheaper. If they used anything more expensive, they’d have to charge you for losing them.
Hotel Keycards Might Not Always Be Victims Of Demagnetization
Sometimes your hotel key just expires. Many hotels program cards to deactivate at checkout time, and if the front desk didn’t properly connect back to back reservations, your card might stop working at midnight or noon even though you’re still staying there. Remember: these are cheap pieces of tech and it’s easy for the front desk to give you a new card. It takes literally seconds.
Other times, it’s not even the actual hotel keycard. Sometimes, the door lock battery could die, or the hotel’s key card encoder is dirty and programmed your card incorrectly in the first place. At the end of the day, don’t stress about it. Just head down to the front desk, get a new one, and go back to bed — that is if your hotel room doesn’t have any bedbugs!
