Some hotel guests can open doors in a blink
Some hotels are moving to iris, fingerprint scans for guests to unlock rooms.
— -- Changing technology has hotels looking beyond the traditional plastic key card as a way to unlock guest-room doors.
The Plaza Hotel in New York, now closed for renovation, will open later this year with radio-frequency cards that unlock the door when swiped past the lock at close range. Paper cards, cellphones, fingerprints and iris scans are popping up as alternative unlocking devices.
The plastic cards that decades ago replaced brass keys still dominate. But the alternative devices could gather momentum as lock suppliers show they can deliver better security, lower costs, greater environmental friendliness or a combination.
The standard plastic key card has a magnetic strip encoded at the front desk to unlock a guest-room door. They cost about 10 cents to make and are designed to be used 20 or more nights.
But guests often carry them away or toss them out after one or two nights of stay, says Brian McGuinness, an executive at Starwood Hotels, which has plans to install locks using radio-frequency technology at some of its hotels.
Among the new options:
•Paper card. Charlotte-based Cadmus makes paper keycards used at several independent hotels. Similar to parking stubs, they contain a magnetic strip on the back and can work in the existing locks that take plastic keys.
Paper cards are more environmentally friendly, without being more costly for hotels, says Ray Berger, CEO of Pineapple Hospitality, which markets Cadmus' keys.
But Mark Goldberg, CEO of Plasticard Locktech International, one of the largest plastic key card manufacturers, says most hotels average about 10 nights per card — not one or two — and that plastic remains the overwhelming favorite among hoteliers because it's more durable. "We've been here 20 years, and we're confident we're going to do (plastic) key cards for a long time," he says.
•Radio-frequency identification (RFID):The Plaza is one of many hotels using or considering RFID, which unlocks doors by verifying information — room number and duration of stay — stored on a chip in the key card.
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