Here’s another quick tip to keep in mind the next time you are on the road again! Bring your hotel room key card home with you! As an organizer, I usually don’t encourage people to bring more home than they left with other than a meaningful souvenir, but I recently learned an almost frightening fact about hotel room key cards. Apparently all of your personal information that you provide the hotel with when reserving a room is stored on your room key card. The hotel only clears your information from the card when it is reused for another guest. But with the large number of cards most hotels keep on hand, your information could remain on card for quite some time. The protocol and standard process may vary from hotel to hotel, but why take the chance? I have never been charged or seen that a hotel charges for room key cards that aren’t turned in. I don’t know exactly how the information can be extracted from the card, but there are people out there who do. With the recent surge in identity theft via electronically stored information, I am never going to leave my hotel room key card behind again!
Search
