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Open Sesame
Swipe it, eye it, finger it. We’ve got the lock on the latest ways to open your hotel room.
Attention, plastic keycard collectors: Your days of amassing those magnetic stripe cards currently in use at nearly every hotel in the civilized world are nearing an end. New technologies — like the radio-frequency system at New York’s Plaza Hotel — are infiltrating hotels to better secure your home away from home.
Though its full reopening is still a few months off, the revamped Plaza is already using a new type of card that opens room doors when swiped across readers. Unlike mag-stripe keycards, these radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags can’t be cloned but can be programmed by hoteliers for dedicated security access — to, say, a hotel’s VIP lounge or executive club floor — and tailored for specific time periods.
RFID could also be the key to enabling your cell to open doors for you. Though the technology is nascent — Sofitel has started testing it at Le Faubourg and Pullman Paris Bercy in Paris — widespread adoption could make the traditional check-in increasingly obsolete, with access codes sent directly to your phone.
Lock tech reality is finally catching up to Hollywood fantasy, too. Kimpton’s Nine Zero Hotel in Boston already has a penthouse suite secured with an LG Electronics scanner: the door opens when the image sensor verifies that the picture of your eye matches the one you had photographed at check-in.
The introduction of digital fingerprinting is also enabling hotel guests to go key free. SoHo Loft in New York — along with a growing number of independent hotels in Europe and several VIP suites in Vegas — now allows you to press an index finger on your door. To keep from provoking too much paranoia, the ultra-exclusive (five-room) SoHo Loft discards the prints every few days. Unless, that is, you request them to keep yours on file — so, as a repeat guest, you can just waltz back in the next time, sans scan.
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