Urban Legend: Hotel Keycards Do NOT Have Your Credit Card Information
Another example of local news only listening to the sensational half of the story:
Fortunately for us, this is absolutely not true:
“I have worked as a desk clerk for three hotels: Holiday Inn, Best Western and the Howard Johnson. In all cases, the TESA lock system (key-card) was not connected to the front desk computer in any way. To create a key for a guest, we typed the room number, the number of nights of the stay and how many keys we wanted to create. That’s all the information that was recorded. There was no way of encoding any other information.”
Computerworld surveyed 100 hotels to see if any of them put credit card information on your key card:
Okay, they didn’t SURVEY them, they brought their key cards home with them when traveling. Once they had gathered them all (over 100), they read them with a card scanner:
Most cards were completely unreadable with an off-the-shelf card reader. Neither Benson nor Computerworld found any personally identifiable information on them.
Looks like they just open your room, so you can leave those useless keys in the room after your stay with no worries.