I just got back from Vegas, and stayed at Paris. One of the very few complaints I had about my stay was actually their room keys. Their room keys are identical to the gold Total Reward cards. I'm Diamond, but my wife is Gold. So, she threw down her room key instead of her TR card on the BJ table to get rated on more than one occasion. I saw it happen several other times at Paris & at Planet Hollywood, same key design. I guess it is the same way at other CET properties as well.
Not so terribly related, but last week I showed my TR card to get into SAMs club, and no one blinked an eye. Lol. Didn't realize it till I went to check out.
Almost never happens. Mainly because my room key is in a different pocket than my players card. Players card gets a ton of use, so almost always in shirt pocket. Room key in back hip pocket.
I stayed at IP years ago and they handed out blank unnamed TR cards as room keys. One late night during the trip I sat down at the bar for a nightcap and some VP. I tried repeatedly to get the machine to read my TR card, prolly spent 15-20 minutes inserting and reinserting that damn card. Bartender finally came over to assist and says "the machine doesn't read room keys, only TR cards!". Needless to say, I suppose I didn't need that nightcap!
I like what they do at the Hard Rock (assume they do this elsewhere too?)... The cards are the same. I can hand them my BackStage Pass when I check in and they program it to open my room too.
I've done that before, too, and had a good laugh with a dealer who politely said she appreciated the gesture but she was happily married.
I think they do issue blanks when they are in the process of switching key designs. I doubt this is a long term thing.
I hear that alot. Not so sure about it though. I have been known to put my cell phone is the very same pocket as my credit cards. And, they are held together with a rubber band. (gave up wallets years ago). Anyways, they all seem work fine.
The last time we were there our room keys had advertising for The Jersey Boys...very different from my TR card.
Flamingo did this a couple of years ago but went back to the standard various key designs. I would expect they may have been out of mag card stock & used that as a sub temporarily. The last stay I had at Paris had a card that had the ET on it I believe a few months back or possibly JB as mentioned above.
Interesting, my last two stays at Paris, June and Feb. Pic of Gordon Ramsey in June, and pic of Eiffel Tower in Feb on key card.
You can read this: http://secureidnews.com/news-item/mythbusters-can-a-mobile-phone-erase-a-hotel-key-card/ Basically, its a maybe. If the hotel uses cheap cards. The quality of magnetic stripes vary in coercivity which measures how difficult it is to encode and erase. From wikipedia "... coercivity measures the resistance of a ferromagnetic material to becoming demagnetized". Cheaper cards are easier to erase and require a less intense applied magnetic field to become demagnetized, so its possible a cell phone can corrupt them.